“Here be monsters,” says the legend on so many antique maps, firing the imagination with thoughts of kraken, chimeras, or worse. But what if it were true? What if Lewis and Clarke, setting out on their expedition across the American interior, encountered buffalo-headed minotaurs and man-eating plants.
That’s the premise of the Corps of Discovery comic and now of this board game adaptation. The game comes from the same designers as the superb Mind MGMT, although, save for the comic book connection, this is a very different kind of game.
What’s in the Box
Most box-openings start with a board, and Corps of Discovery is no exception, but the nature of the board itself is rather surprising. Instead of the usual fold-out affair, you get a cardboard sandwich: two layers of card stuck together, with room in between to slip in a sheet of paper. The top layer is punctuated by a regular grid of circular holes, and the box contains an equally unusual supply of thick cardboard sun tokens with wide “pegs” that fit loosely into the grid’s holes.
There are two folders of paper maps that slide into the sandwich, one for each of the two scenarios included in the game. There’s also a second board which is used for tracking the current game state, with spaces for three challenge cards, backpack items and water: this doubles as a handy reminder of the flow of each game day. There are tokens for the various resources that go in your backpack and for your water supply. There are also several card decks, not only the challenge cards that’ll outline the obstacles you must overcome each day, but also characters to play, items for them to use and so on.
As a scenario-based game, there are also additional cards and tokens applicable to particular scenarios. One thing to note is that, as a game based on a comic book series, all the components are furnished with excellent art from the original comics. While it might not be to everyone’s tastes, it does a fantastic job of bringing the game’s dangerous world to life, especially if you’re familiar with the source material.
Rules and How It Plays
Understanding how the game is set up is, unusually, an integral part of understanding how it plays. First, your group chooses one of the two scenarios to play (plus a training mission), and one of the 10 map sheets included for that scenario, covering it with a blank sheet so you can’t see what’s on it. You slip this, cover and all, into the cardboard-sandwich board then cover all the holes with the sun tokens. Then you slip out the blank sheet. The result is a game map that you know nothing about, ripe for exploration and discovery.
This is a cooperative game where you’re working together to map the wilderness and survive. On your individual turn, you simply remove a sun token, revealing an icon underneath, and take a matching resource to add to your collective backpack. There’s no piece to mark where you are on the map. Instead, movement is abstracted away under the presumption that it’s easy to move through already explored territory. The next player just removes a sun token next to any already-revealed space, although there are some mountainous areas on each map that you can’t traverse.
Exploration, however, is far from a random walk in the park. Each scenario has a set of rules about where and how the various different icons are laid out. In the Fauna scenario, for example, there’s always one wood icon per row and column, and there will always be a water icon orthogonally adjacent to each wood. Each mud icon will be next to a water and a stone, while forts always form an L-shape series with a water and a skull. There are more rules – and icons – but you get the idea.
This allows you to make predictions and deductions about what you’re going to encounter on the map. Sometimes you can figure it out with complete certainty, but more often it’s a bit of a gamble, where you can narrow down the odds without being sure. Exploration is thus both a fun puzzle where you can aim for specific resources, and an exercise loaded with tension. The rules are complex enough to make it a good group discussion, ensuring there’s a dynamic sense of cooperation, and something you can master with practice.
Each time you remove a sun token from the board you place it on one of three challenge cards dealt at the start of the game day. These cards have a resource requirement that you must spend in order to pass the challenge and a consequence for passing or failing, the latter of which usually means losing even more, different resources. You have to face these consequences once the card accumulates a certain number of suns, often only two or three. Considering many challenges require more than two or three resources to pass, this immediately puts your game under massive pressure to find the right icons on every turn.
If you run out of water tokens, you die. If you end the day – timing out the three challenge cards for that die – without any food tokens, you die. Monsters generally don’t kill you outright but sap these precious, precious resource tokens until you die. Even when you’re on top of the resource-mapping system, most games will go down to the wire of you gaining your objective with a few measly drops of water left in your canteen. The last few turns ramp up the tension to crushing levels, until it almost feels like you’re struggling through a real wilderness, desperately following signs of water in the hope of surviving just one more day.
As if this wasn’t enough, on top of surviving you also have a goal to complete. This depends on the scenario. In Fauna, for instance, you’ll meet those buffalo-headed minotaurs who’ll make it harder to traverse rows and columns until you find a fort, learn a recipe for killing one, and sacrifice the necessary resources, all of which you were probably hoping to save to pass a challenge card. These kinds of trade-offs are part of the game’s strategy: identifying times when failing a daily challenge can be a useful step in the wider goal of passing the winning objectives.
Other aspects of your decision-making come down to the characters in play and the gear you choose at the outset, all of which offer you special abilities to piece together and increase your chance of survival. You can plan ahead with these since you pick them yourself, look for combos, and build a strategy around them. But there are also destiny cards, random helpful bonuses that you can sometimes replenish by achieving in-game goals, and for these you’ll have to roll with whatever fate gives you, adjusting your tactics accordingly.
With practice and luck you will, eventually, manage to beat Fauna and, in time, the game’s second scenario, Flora, which involves a giant carnivorous plant. Corps of Discovery goes out of its way to make these scenarios replayable by offering such a huge range of map sheets – you can also download and print out more – that memorising the layouts is essentially impossible. Variety, however, cannot fully undermine human psychology: there’s an innate tendency to treat a mission as “done” once it’s been won. This is exacerbated by the game’s high difficulty level and lack of narrative detail. Although it does a great job of conjuring up the spectre of starving in the wilderness, the challenge cards feel pretty mechanical, so repeated tries at a scenario can feel a little same-y.
This isn’t quite the limiting factor it may sound like as it’ll take you repeated attempts to win both the scenarios, and there are expansions available which further the story and build considerably on the core mechanics – all four are included in the deluxe edition, which we used for the photos accompanying this review. But it still would have felt like a more complete experience if more of these elements had been included in the base game. As it stands, the game’s high toughness is the major motivation for a replay, and it’s almost enough by itself: winning against the odds, in a land where almost everything you encounter is out to kill you, is a hugely satisfying moment.
