First Impressions of Discoveries

I’ve discovered a game about writing a diary! Well, not really discovered, I just wanted to make the pun. Discoveries is 2015’s dice based reimaging of Lewis and Clark, a game of racing to be the first team to reach the Pacific coast of America in the opening years of the 19th Century. Discoveries focuses on the journey, rather than the destination, and to me is much the more interesting for it. You’ll be making new scientific discoveries, exploring down the river and befriending the native peoples of this vast tract of unexplored land, writing up the results of these expeditions in your journal each day. The player with the best journal at the end of the game wins.

It’s a really neat game. The custom dice are used to determine the actions you can perform, travelling down a certain number of rivers or across mountains on your expedition card, interacting with the locals to gain some bonus, like a new action space, and finally writing up your adventure, which allows you to score any completed expeditions and removes your dice from your player board. Some of these can be kept, others go to the camps to recover from their tumbling ordeal. You have to spend a turn to retrieve these dice, but you do so in an interesting way.

 

Discoveries Dice

 

There are two different camps, which dice go to in accordance with the action you’ve taken, and these camps are shared between the players. You may either take all the dice from a single camp, which allows you to take other player’s dice, or retrieve all your dice from anywhere, including the other player’s pools and boards. Stealing a player’s dice gives you more dice to roll, but you can expect them to call them back pretty quickly, so you might not have them for long. In my first game I wasn’t really able to make much use of this, but I’m very intrigued by the possibilities it opens up with skilled timing.

Discoveries also makes fantastic use of its components to provide a lot of variability. It contains a single deck of double sided cards, one side the rivers and mountains you will be exploring, the other the Indian camps you can visit for bonuses. As cards from each market are taken, a new card is drawn to replace it, fixing that card as either a route or an Indian card for the remainder of that game. You therefore only ever see half the possible set of cards in any play. I really appreciate this elegant mechanism.

Discoveries is a very neat game and the artwork is fantastic. My biggest fear is that getting good Indian cards early in the game can be quite a big advantage, and this requires rolling the right results on the dice. Getting both an additional die and more useful action spaces cannot be under-estimated. But this is a minor quibble for what appears to be a lovely, interesting game.

 

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