Episode 284: The Lost Expedition

 

Release Date: Feb. 16, 2018

Download: PDF

Designer: Peer Sylvester

Publisher:  Osprey Games

1-5 pl  30-60 min  ages 14+  $30

 
 

 

In April of 1925 explorer and adventurer Percy Fawcett set off into the Brazilian jungle in search of the lost city of Z. Z was Fawcett’s code name for El Dorado, a mythical hidden city filled with immense wealth. He was accompanied by his eldest son, Jack and Jack’s best friend Raleigh Rimmel. They disappeared five weeks later. His last letter was dated May 29 from Dead Horse Camp and recounts the many hardships the group had already faced but was generally optimistic. To this day, no one knows the real fate of this adventure. 

In the Lost Expedition, you and your fellow players take up the task of Percy Fawcett and attempt to do what he could not: find the Lost City of Z and live to tell the tale!

Written review continues after the break.

The Lost Expedition     Official Site  |  BGG  |  Buy

The Concept 

In April of 1925 explorer and adventurer Percy Fawcett set off into the Brazilian jungle in search of the lost city of Z. Z was Fawcett’s code name for El Dorado, a mythical hidden city filled with immense wealth. He was accompanied by his eldest son, Jack and Jack’s best friend Raleigh Rimmel. They disappeared five weeks later. His last letter was dated May 29 from Dead Horse Camp and recounts the many hardships the group had already faced but was generally optimistic. To this day, no one knows the real fate of this adventure.

In the Lost Expedition, you and your fellow players take up the task of Percy Fawcett and attempt to do what he could not: find the Lost City of Z and live to tell the tale!

The Components

The Lost Expedition is a card game. It features 71 oversized cards that serve several different functions.

There are 6 explorer cards representing the intrepid adventurers. Each explorer has a specific skill related to jungle, navigation or camping and this skill is shown by an icon on the card.

There are 9 numbered expedition cards which will track your team’s course through the jungle. Depending on the difficulty of the game, you’ll use some or all of these cards.

Last but not least the remaining 56 cards form the Adventure deck. These cards represent all the dangers you’ll encounter throughout your expedition. Each card has a colored box or boxes filled with icons. We’ll learn more about these in just a moment.

There are also cardboard tokens representing food, bullets, and health.

There’s a time token to keep track of the morning and evening phases of the game, an expedition leader token, and there are meeples you’ll use to chart your team’s progress through the game.

The artist and artwork are both noteworthy. Garen Ewing is an award winning comic writer and illustrator most known for his work The Adventures of Julius Chancer. Ewing is clearly inspired by Tin Tin both in style and theme and that shines through clearly in the artwork of the game. It gives the game a sense of rollicking adventure ripped from the pages of a pulp novel.

To setup the game, decide on the difficulty level you’d like to play. Easy uses 7 expedition cards, meaning your team will have traverse 7 cards to find El Dorado. Normal uses 9 cards. And Hard uses 9 but each explorer starts with one less health (3) than the normal 4.

Shuffle the adventure deck and deal four cards to each player.

Now decide which explorers you’d like to use for this expedition, choosing one from each skill type. Regardless of the number of players, the team of explorers in the game is always limited to three (just like the real Fawcett expedition). This means, unlike other co-ops where each player assumes a particular role or character, every player in The Lost Expedition is making choices for the entire team.

The Mechanics

The Lost Expedition is a cooperative game. If at least one member of your team of explorers arrives at the lost city of Z, you win! Sort of self-evident, but if everyone dies, you lose. Also, if the adventure deck runs out of cards for a second time, you lose.

So, get your team to the Lost City without dying. Let’s get cracking!

Each turn represents a day of your journey through the jungle. Your goal is to overcome dangerous situations (in the form of Adventure cards) and make progress on the track of Expedition cards. Think of The Lost Expedition like a race game. Each day, you want to be able to take at least one step closer to the Lost City card at the end of the track. Each day you are delayed, your chances of survival will dwindle.

The day is broken into two hikes - a morning hike and an evening hike. At the end of each hike, your team needs to eat and will consume one food token. Hacking through the jungle is hungry work! If you have no food, one explorer will starve and lose a health token.

Each hike will consist of adventure cards played to the table in a line called The Path The team must overcome each card in The Path in order to make it through the hike. To overcome an adventure card, we need to learn more about the choices and icons each card might have. An adventure card will have at least one colored box with a line of icons. The color of the box is significant. Yellow boxes are mandatory. Blue Boxes are optional. Red Boxes require a choice. There will be multiple red boxes on a card and you must pick one to resolve. Some cards might have multiple colored boxes. If so, you deal with yellow first (mandatory), then red (pick one red box) and then blue (optional).

Regardless of color, when you resolve a line of icons in a box start with the left icon and work your way to the right. The line of icons are basically a recipe you must follow in the order listed.

So what do these icons mean? First, the basics.

A black icon is good. This means you gain the icon listed either in the form of a token or the adventure card itself (when fully resolved).

A white icon is bad. This means you must spend the icon listed either in the form of a token or an adventure card you have in your supply or by sacrificing health from an explorer.

There are four basic types of icons in the game

Resource Icons

If you gain a token, grab one and place it in your team’s supply. If you must spend one, turn one token in. If you’re out of a required token, an explorer must lose a health for each token you’re short.

Skill Icons

When you gain a skill you will place the resolved adventure card in your team’s supply. Once there, you can spend these cards to resolve other boxes that require that icon.

Alternatively, your explorers can use their skills to resolve an icon. An explorer with the matching skill spends one health and explorer without the matching icon spends 2 health. You only start with 4 health so be wary about spending health willy-nilly!

Path Icons
(these deal with the line of cards that make The Path) 

Expedition Icons
(these help you win or lose the game) 

Advancing on the expedition track is how you win the game - each time this icon is resolved you take one step closer to the Lost City of Z! Death is certainly brutal but unavoidable at times. Remember only one explorer has to survive to win the game.

Every box you encounter will likely contain a mix of these icons. Let’s look at a some examples.

Fever has a yellow box and two red boxes. We have to deal with the yellow first so one explorer must lose a health token and then we switch two other cards on The Path. Now we have a choice to make. We can either lose another health token OR we can spend a camping skill. If we have camping skill card in our supply, that’s a safer bet since we keep our adventurers health.

Rapids has two red boxes and a blue box. We have to resolve the red first and decide which box we want to do. One box, we spend a food, then add a card to the Path and then get to move forward on the Expedition track. The other we spend a food, spend a navigation skill and move on the Expedition track. Either way, we’re taking one step toward victory! After deciding, we have the option of doing the blue box which says spend a jungle skill and then swap two cards in the line twice. 

The Jaguar has two red boxes. We will have to do one. Either we lose two health tokens and then get to discard the next card in the line OR we lose a bullet token and gain the adventure card for its jungle skill.

The Venomous Spider has a yellow and two red boxes. Yellow first. We swap two cards in the line. Then we either spend a camping skill OR someone dies! Let’s hope we have a card to spend or an adventurer alive with the camping skill!

The Hi’Aito’ihi tribe has three red boxes. We pick one. Spend a bullet and a health and then take a step forward on the Expedition track OR someone dies and take a step forward on the Expedition track OR spend a health token and gain the card to spend later as a camping or navigation skill.

The cards are almost always a mixed blessing. Trying to decide when and what to spend and how to reorder the path is a giant puzzle the whole group will enjoy trying to untangle in the best way possible for the team.

What Sets This Game Apart 

What sets The Lost Expedition apart is the difference between day and night. And I mean that quite literally.

Each turn has a morning and an evening hike where cards are placed in a line and must be resolved by your team.

The WAY the cards are placed in this line is different based on the time of day!

In the morning players take turns playing one card at a time and the cards will be arranged in the line from lowest number to highest number. Every Adventure card has a number in the bottom left corner. If I play my Poisonous Frog which is number 16 and then you play your Swarm which is number 23, the frog will go before the swarm.

This might not seem crucial until you factor in gaining and spending tokens and cards. In the right order you might be able to gain a token or card before you need to spend them. And let’s not forget the icons that let you rearrange or discard cards from the line.

From our example, if the frog comes before the swarm, the discard icon in the frog’s yellow box will allow us to discard the next card, getting rid of the swarm card entirely!

Suddenly there are some really tough choices to make based on the numbers not just the icons.

And here’s the rub.

While the game is completely cooperative, you are not allowed to discuss the details of the cards in your hand! This ups the challenge of the game significantly but also increases the fun since you have to do the best you can with partial information.

As if this were not enough, come evening, the rules for placing cards in the line change. Now, numbers on the cards are completely ignored and cards are arranged in the line on the table in the order they are played.

This might not seem so odd until you remember that you only have four cards in your hand each day! This means the two cards you do not play in the morning are the cards you will be playing in the evening. So you not only have to think about the numbers you might want to play for morning but what kind of cards that will leave you to play come evening.

Again, you cannot share specific information about your cards with your fellow players.

In essence, each turn across the cycle of morning and evening you, the players, are setting the path you must overcome. It’s up to you to not create a trap so deadly your team cannot survive.

This structure makes The Lost Expedition an experience very different from other cooperative games. In many if not most other co-ops, the game itself has a phase where it pushes back against the players. In The Lost Expedition, the players themselves provide that pressure as individuals and it is up to the group to find a way through.

Final Thoughts 

The Lost Expedition is hard to win. And it should be. There’s little fun in a cooperative game that’s too easy to win. And there’s no joy in playing a game you know you’ll always lose. This game walks the razor’s edge between these two experiences in a most innovative way. The players themselves are given power and control over how the game fights back against your team. Once the cards begin to form the Path for a given turn, your team can start to formulate a strategy to survive and as part of that discussion it may become obvious to you that a certain card in your hand could help or hinder that plan. Its a fun and conflicted experience to be on both sides of the game every time you go on a hike.

Win or lose, the game builds to a tense crescendo at some point and even if the explorers are doomed, so much of the fun comes from feeling like your decisions (good and bad) helped determine the fate of the team.

Agency is what I am talking about. Many games in this genre rely on the randomness of a card drawn or the fate of a die roll to create chaos or challenges for players. There’s certainly randomness in how the cards are shuffled and dealt each day to players, but in The Lost Expedition, the players are given agency, they have the power to shape or mitigate these challenges and chaos in their favor.

Many times I walk away from a loss playing other co-ops saying “man, the game really hated us this time” - meaning the game ended up having more power over our fate than we did. In The Lost Expedition, if I lose it’s more a sense of self loathing because we know, collectively, we did this to ourselves!

It’s a delicious irony to say that self loathing can be fun, but in all honesty, that’s one of the wonderful things about the game. If you make it to the Lost City of Z there’s a great sense of accomplishment and pride. If you fail, there’s a sense that you know you can do better next time since more of the failure falls squarely on your shoulders, too.

The game plays quickly. An hour for your first go and 30-40 minutes once you know the flow and icons. For a game that takes the coop genre down a fun and different winding jungle path, give The Lost Expedition a try and I think you’ll see why it deserves our Spiel of Approval.

NOTE: There are solo and a head-to-head variants of the game. Our review covers the core co-op rules.

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