At the beginning of Explorers, you and each other explorer place four landscape tiles — grasslands, bodies of water, desert or mountains — and three different scoring tiles in your game frame. Then from your starting village, you go on an exploratory tour.
The exploration cards, each of which shows two landscapes, indicates which landscapes you are allowed to cross (off). On your turn, you reveal an exploration card, chooses one of the two types of terrain, then cross off three spaces ahead of your current location. Your fellow players must then decide whether to place only two crosses on the same landscape, or choose the other landscape and tick off three crosses. All of your crosses must be orthogonally adjacent, so you need to plan well to avoid being stuck due to "bad" landscape choices.
Over four rounds, you expand your territory, receiving a special action for each checked box with an object in it. You receive points for provisions and gems, with a map you can place crosses on any type of terrain, and lost temples can be explored with keys — but whoever reaches the temple first receives the most points for it...
Explorers contains a solo version as well as additional task tiles for experienced players, with more than a million possible game combinations.
- Exceptional component quality and production values
- Beautiful and colorful visual presentation
- Smooth and light gameplay experience
- Quick play time (60-90 minutes)
- Non-clunky mechanics
- Straightforward and simple to learn
- Good rulebook with pictorial examples and round summary
- Interesting twist on drafting and worker placement
- Thoughtful decision-making without brain-burning complexity
- Multiple viable strategies for winning
- Thick wooden tokens instead of plastic miniatures
- Colorblind-friendly card design with symbols
- Linen finished rulebook
- Good game for detouring from heavy complex games
- Player board has fake jewel layer that doesn't hold trading posts securely
- Trading posts slide around on player board
- Turn order compass mechanic is overly fiddly
- Compass mechanic is difficult to see what's what
- Purple token building trade post worker space is too powerful
- Rulebook layout could be slightly better
- Some rules can be hard to reference exactly
- exploration
- lands
- mountain
- desert
- forest
- factions
- trading posts
- Waters Deep
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Jesus tap dancing Christ is this game well produced
- This is a colorful spectacle on the table
- I am starting to get sick and tired of everybody trying to do Miniatures in their games
- The drawer of explorers and why this game works is its Simplicity its pleasantness
- It's a very smooth experience
- There's enough depth of decision space without burning the brain cells
- It's a nice light shorter Euro which in a year where we seem to be in inded with extremely long complex 3our plus Euros it's a nice refreshing change of place