LogFAQs > #935711486

13. Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis and Clark (2015)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Dice placement, sequence-building, tableau-building, order fulfillment, card-drafting
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 4
Game length: 30-45 minutes
Experience: 15+ plays with 3-4 (2015, 2017-19)
Previous ranks: NR/100 (2016), NR/100 (2018)

Summary - In the unexplored American west, each player competes to traverse and journal the most valuable sceneries. Each player had a set of colored dice. A turn consists of either placing dice of matching faces from your matching pool onto your player board, or recruiting all dice from the common discard area or all dice of your color. Dice are used primarily to recruit Indians to build your tableau or to traverse rivers and mountains so you can fulfill your personal route card and draft another.

Design - Like most heavily dice-driven games Discoveries makes it a point to have sweet dice - large and wooden, with custom faces and rounded corners. You actually roll dice fairly infrequently; most of your time is spent spending or assigning them to specific spots on the board. But when you do roll them - which happens when you recruit/recall dice, or pick them up off your board after fulfilling the route those were assigned to - it feels fantastic.

The infrequency of dice rolls also means you'll usually be looking at a static dice pool between turns, as the only practical way this can be tampered with is if you have other players' dice in the mix. Since you'll usually assign just 1-3 dice (of the same face), your turn will be quick, and since fulfilling routes requires several dice and multiple placements, you'll be forced to (and able to) plan a few turns ahead. Add this to the fact that rolling dice ends your turn, and you've got a recipe for excellent pacing, which winds up being one of the things I love most about the game. I will say that it needs rapid pacing, because it can be tight - in order to fulfill a route, you may need several dice of the same face, requiring relatively uneventful turns drafting dice and reassigning them. But if your group gets in the rhythm, this becomes a tightness and tension of efficiency instead of the potential tedium that could come from building Rome one brick at a time.

The other most satisfying part of running your engine and painstakingly setting up all your dice - the supermove. Each player always has a route card to fulfill on their own player board, while three cards are on offer for people to draft after completing their own route. A supermove entails placing enough dice to complete your own route as well as one of the routed on offer, sequentially, and fulfilling them at the same time. If you do this, you not only score both tickets, you also get a free turn afterward. It's one of the absolute most satisfying things you can do, and while I've gone games without doing it and I've never really seen a player do it more than three times, it feels like the ultimate payoff to all the meticulously plotting you've been doing. Mastering even a single route can be tough, if it's difficult; knocking off two at once - including one that can be disrupted by another playing drafting your second (usually simple) route, getting that extra turn, is phenomenal.

The downside to Discoveries is also tied to there being relatively few dice rolls: it can be a bit luck-driven. And since it's multiplayer-solitaire-y, no one is really able to sympathize with your poor rolls. The fact is that your engine will be heavily determined by the Indian heads you roll early, in addition to the Indian cards available. However, because of the relative speed of most games, this doesn't feel so bad. The solitaire elements, if you ignore others' sprinting ahead of you, are satisfying enough in their own right to mitigate that.

Experience - Discoveries isn't the single most unique light-middleweight euro. It doesn't have the most unique design or mechanics. It is beautiful, and it filled an incredible niche, though - a eurogame with low conflict, high tactile feel, incredibly smooth play, beautiful art, and low playtime. It's essentially only with my core gaming group that I play it (since I don't own it), but it really was right place, right time - for a euro that's considerably more intricate than the likes of Splendor, it's astounding how much utility we could get out of it - it took the place of many other end-of-night fillers. Haven't yet played it this year, but huge on this one

Future - Almost got this to the table last night to close the night, but didn't quite. It's not "serious" enough of a game to wear out yet, in my experience. Still very eager for more.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness