The Lost Expedition

19th February.

Game Night at The Sovereigns.

The first time I saw 'The Lost Expedition' I though 'Wow - a Tintin game'!

It looks like a Tintin game. It's not a Tintin game, but it's still a good game.

Inspired by actual real reality! The Lost Expedition tells the tale of 3 intrepid explorers searching for 'The Lost City of Z', which as the name hints... is lost deep in somewhere nasty, somewhere you (and I'm assuming you're reasonably sane) would never want to go.
Additionally, each of the 3 explorers has an area of expertise, these are; Jungle, Navigation and camping. more on expertise later.

The Lost Expedition is a co-operative card game for up to 5 players.

At the game start, a series of 9 'expedition' cards at laid out in order from left to right. A meeple representing the actual expedition is placed on card 1. The game is collectively won by getting the meeple on to the last card.
Each expedition member is given 4 health tokens and the expedition is also communally granted some food and ammo tokens.

The basics of game play are:

Each player is dealt 4 cards, these are 'adventure' cards. Adventure is the game's way to saying 'really horrible'.
Each turn is broken up into a day phase and a night phase. During each phase, every player will (one card at a time) play 2 adventure cards from their hand. These form the 'path' that the expedition must follow for that phase. However, the order in which the adventure cards become the path differs between night and day.

• All the cards a numbered.
• During the day phase, all cards are re-ordered in numerical order from lowest to highest to form the day's path.
• During the night phase, the path created in the order that the adventure cards are played.
• This means that in each phase the adventure path will be equal in length to twice the number of players. Thus in a 4 player game, the path will be 8 cards long.

Once the path has been created, starting from left to right, the players must deal with the encounters displayed on the adventure cards. 

• The order in which the cards a placed to form the path is very important, because encounters from a card may affect how you deal with encounters with cards further along the path

There are 3 types of encounter that can appear on an adventure card.

• Yellow encounters; these encounters are mandatory and cannot be avoided (unless the card is skipped entirely (see below).
• Red encounters; if a card has a red encounter (and most do), there will always be more than 1 option. The players must choose which one of the red encounters they want to do.
• Blue encounters; players may choose to do all, some or none of the blue encounters found on a card.​

So now we know that adventure cards have encounters on them, but what are encounters and how do we deal with them?
Dealing with an encounter usually involves spending some sort of resource, you may or may not get something in return for spending it.

For example; you may encounter a dangerous wild animal that gives you 2 red options (you must pick 1 of the available choices). These options might be:

• Option 1: Lose 1 health, this could be interpreted as being injured whilst fleeing or driving the beast away.
• Option 2: Lose 1 ammo & gain 2 food, This could be interpreted as using a gun to kill the animal and butchering the body for meat.

Now in the 2 choices above, option 2 is probably the better option, you're losing 1 resource to gain 2 of another resource. But it's much harder to replenish bullets than regain either food or health. So if you've got a lot of food and health, you may want to lose the health to keep the ammo. You may need to use the ammo to deal with a more dangerous encounter in a card further along the path.

The game is full of these choices where you have to look ahead and figure out what is the best approach. A lot of the time dealing with an encounter is a matter of diminishing returns (with regards to your resources). Which is what makes your decisions tough and therefore important, which is what makes the game good.

Spending resources; below is a list of the resources you will need to spend over the game:

• Ammo.
• Health: If an explorer's health reaches 0, then they die. you can no longer make use of their expertise. 
• Food: If you have no food, an explorer must lose health
• Expertise: You must gain expertise before you can spend it (see below). If you can't spend the required resource, then the explorer who has that type of expertise must lose health, or another explorer must lose 2 health.
• Death! Some choices will require the instant death of a character.

So what do you gain for spending the resources listed above.

• Ammo: On rare occasion, you can acquire ammo.
• Health: An explorers health cannot go above the starting value of 4.
• Food.
• Expertise: Some cards will give you expertise, when you gain the expertise, you put the card into the communal playing area with the ammo and food. Cards may contain 1, 2 or all 3 types of expertise, but may only be spent once for 1 type of expertise (provided you have an explorer with the matching type of expertise still alive)and is then discarded.
• Skip: If an encounter gives you a skip, then it means the next card in the path is discarded, normally a good thing.
• Swap: This allows the players to swap to cards further along the path around so that they encounter them in a different order. This can prove really useful, particularly when used in conjunction with the skip action.
• Add: This adds another card to the end of the path. Generally bad.
• Remove: This removes the last card from the path. Generally good.
• Advance: This moves your meeple 1 card along the expedition trail. This is the only way to win the game. This means getting to the 9th card requires playing the advance action 8 times (since you start on card 1). 

So when you complete a path, discard all adventures cards and switch from day to night. When you complete a night phase, you spend a food and change back to day and deal new adventure cards to all players. Repeat until you reach the end of the game.

You lose if:

• All the explorers die.
• You play through the adventure deck twice.

You win if you:

• Get your meeple to the last expedition card.

And there you have it. The lost expedition can also be played solo and competitively in 2 teams, neither of which I've tried.
But in co-operative play it's a good game, where every decision can matter and your constantly having to make hard choices. God alone knows how hard it was for real explorers. I'm glad that The Lost Expedition is as close to it as I'll ever need to get.

One last nod goes to Garen Ewing's outstanding illustrations. They lend the game a whole adventure story feel, which I really liked.

Port Royal - 02

2nd game of Port Royal.
​You can find my original blog here.