- Designer: Peer Sylvester
- Artist: Garen Ewing
- Publisher: Osprey Games
- Players: 1-5
What will you be doing?
You will be playing the part of explorers, following in the footsteps of the real-life explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared in his quest for an ancient lost city of El Dorado. In your journeys through the steamy tendrils of the Amazonian rainforest, you will struggle with limited supplies against the hardships of the forests and its dangerous denizens.
You are unlikely to survive…
How does it play?
The Lost Expedition is a card game, with an emphasis on hand management and resource management, and a simple but very clever hiking central mechanic. It plays 1-5, with co-operative and head-to-head game modes, the exact rules varying slightly depending on the game mode. This review is based on the solo mode, the only mode I have played.
Setup is simple. Choose 3 expedition members, place 3 health tokens on each, and take the specified number of ammo and food tokens,. Lay out 9 cards to create a trail toward your end goal, El Dorado, and place a meeple on the first card. Then shuffle the expedition deck.
A round is divided into two hiking phases, morning and evening. In the morning, you deal yourself 6 cards. You then need to place 6 cards one at a time, in numeric order, from a combination of your hand and the deck. You will be left with three of your originally dealt cards for your evening hike.
Then proceed along your hike, one card at a time, taking the actions on the card. Some of the actions are mandatory (usually the nasty ones), whereas some are optional. You are sometimes forced or allowed to choose between two options.
Most of the mandatory actions require you spend a resource – either food, ammo or health, while others require a cost in ‘expertise’ to complete. You can complete these through the use of cards with expertise symbols that you have completed earlier in the game, or by sacrificing the health of your explorers.
Some actions affect the course of the hike, by adding additional cards, or enabling you to skip cards or swap card order. Skipping and swapping can be very useful to pick up resources when you need them, or even completely avoid the worst cards, and can form a central and satisfying part of your strategy. Resources are very, very tight in this game so the luck of the draw cannot be relied on – planning ahead is fundamental to success.
Speaking of success, crucially some actions allow you to progress your meeple along the trail track, often with a heavy price to pay.
The evening hike plays similarly to the morning, except you have more freedom in when to play from your hand and when to play from the deck, and crucially you can ignore the numbers on the cards when deciding what order to lay them – instead you choose whether to play each card before the first card or after the last card.
You repeat this process until the game ends, which is either when all your expedition members die (the most likely outcome), you play through the expedition deck twice, or you reach El Dorado.
My thoughts
I love this game. Admittedly I have real soft spot for stories and games set in this time period, especially those that involve exploration and adventure, so I am perhaps pre-disposed to liking it, but even so this game excels in what it sets out to do.
First of all the mechanics are compelling. You really feel like you are battling through the jungle. The choices are agonising – you often find yourself torn between choosing an action to progress along the trail or gaining some much needed resources. Sometimes you deliberate as to whether to play a particularly nasty card while you still have the resources to deal with it, or hold off in the hope that there’s a way of mitigating or avoiding its effect with a card you might later draw from the deck.
And the mechanical effects of the cards really evoke their theme. An anaconda attack might spell death or an opportunity to gain some much needed food. An abandoned camp can provide respite, or a mist impede your progress. The tightness of the resource management similarly evokes the miserable conditions of the expedition.
And speaking of theme, the artwork outstanding, and the large sized cards really let that artwork shine. As you lay them out in front of you, you feel like you creating a beautiful comic strip book. Just look at these samples:
The Lost Expedition is a game I come back to often. It is quick to set up, mechanically simple, yet clever, satisfyingly puzzly, and very challenging. And even when it all goes horribly wrong (the vast majority of plays), it is always enjoyable and immersive, taking you on a beautifully rendered, evocative adventure in less than 30 minutes.
Highly recommended.
