Corps of Discovery Duo Review - We've Seen That Tree 3 Times Now...

0:00 Hey, I'm Alex Radical from Board Gameco and today I'm reviewing Core of Discovery Duo from Off the Page Games. Core of Discovery Duo is a two-player version of Core of Discovery from Off the Page Games, the same publisher. This one though takes the same genre, includes the deductive elements, but also adds a whole element of limited communication to give you a totally different and yet familiar two-player experience. Before we go into this further, this is a prototype, all the rules and components of the exchange, and I'll have a link to the crafting campaign down below. Additionally, this channel is sponsored by Allplay. More about them at the end of the video. In Core of Discovery Duo, you're going to be building out a map together with the other player. You're one other player. There's one other not other player, just a single other person. You're building out the map together. You're working to try to make a map that fits all the rules. both the public rules, the rules that you know about yourself, and then the rules that you don't yet know, but you're trying to figure out so you can make everyone's lives a whole lot easier. This game is a little challenging to teach. And so, I'm going to just play things out because I find that can give you a lot of information a lot quicker. I'll also say that if you're going into this being like, I know core discovery, I'm just going to start off as if you don't know anything.

1:10 is if you're new to the game entirely, you've never heard of Core Discovery cuz I think it it's not it's really not that hard, but it's not that intuitive either. The basic idea of the game is you are building out this map. You are ultimately trying to find the fort in the game. The problem is the fort has specific rules of what the fort is next to, and we don't know those rules yet because we haven't explored enough yet. So, we're going to start by exploring. Every single turn, you're going to be playing a card into the shared map grid. You can either take a card from the rightmost of your cards over here. If I do that, in fact, let's just go and do that and then show you what happens. I'm gonna do that. That is one of three possible actions for me. I've taken a card from this and then I'm going to go ahead and reveal a new card, putting this into play when I'm done. So, I'm placing this card out into the grid. That's going to start our grid. The good news is we don't really need a ton of information right now because this is the very first card played. Although, we do know from this board that all of our vines need to be connected. I am playing on the basic side of these boards.

2:01 There's an advanced side as well, but all the vines over here need to be connected. So, any future vines that my partner builds, uh, they have to be connected. And then I'm going to go ahead and draw a card for my partner. Now, I'm going to be showing you my board. I'm just going to be drawing cards from them to just fill out the map, but they'd have the exact same setup as me. So, they'll play a card over here. They played that card over here. Now, they don't know anything about this card over there, but they have their own rule set. They know what they have to be doing with stock with a rock. I don't know what they have to be doing. All I know is they have a rule around rock that has to be fulfilled, but we'll get to that. Back to my turn. I have the berries. Now, berries, if I look at my personal rule that again that my partner does not know, I know that berries have to have four different things on the diagonals. Now, they could be empty, that's fine. But if I have a berry here and then like a vine and a vine, that's illegal. That's not allowed. So, I'm going to go ahead and take this berry and I'm going to place it down over here. Again, I could play cards in my back row, I'm not going to do so yet. So, so far, I'm respecting all my rules. This will shift down.

2:56 Great. We're doing fine. My partner's going to go ahead and play a card as well. We'll have them go ahead and play a card. They have this. This is one of my cards. They don't know what I want with it right now. They'll just go ahead and place it out like so. Great. They've placed that card over there. It's not on the public pool. We're fine. Back to my turn. I will choose to play a card from my back row. Now, the cards in your back row are the specific elements that are on your personal board. There are 10 different terrain types, and the cards in my back row are the five that I have on my personal logic board. I normally would not do this this early. Just showing you how it plays. So, right now, usually I'm doing it because I'm doing something in a pinch. So, right now, to give my uh teammates some more information, I know that water droplets have to be diagonally adjacent to flowers. That's this rule over here. Because of the characters we're playing with, I should note, by the way, there are different characters in the game. There's four characters, at least in the prototype I have. I'm playing with two of them. One of them is mine and one of them is my card to just see my partner and try to make guesses there. So, I'm going to use the water droplet from the back row and I'm going to place this down here because that is diagonally adjacent to a flower. Now, my partner, if they were trying to guess my board, they would probably, but not for sure, know because they know that water droplets are mine. They know the flowers are mine. Ooh, the rock's not mine. So, that's probably not that. They would have good reason to believe that these two are diagonally adjacent if I'm playing with a good partner who's reading my moves because that's why I would pull a card from my back row to do that. It wouldn't make sense to do it if the water droplet were my top card because that's not like a great placement for that right now. And the water droplet could be orthogonally adjacent to something because I do have an orthogonally adjacent rule where these two elements need to be orthogonally adjacent. But again, the

4:26 rock's not mine. The rock is theirs. So, it does make sense that that's my rule. That that was my uh play over there that I'm trying to give them that information. Which means behind their screen, they'll move around a bunch of tokens. And now when they're playing those cards, they can help match my rule by watching my behavior. This card will stay over here. We'll mark that. That's mine. Okay, great. And then another thing has happened. Right now, we just got up to a 3x3 size, meaning until this card was in the grid, this is only a 3x two. It was three tall and two wide. As soon as this is placed there, it's a 3x3. Even though it's not full, it's a 3x3, which means we're now going to reveal our 3x3 token. This first token is going to go into the fort, we know that the fort has to be orthogonally adjacent to a berry and something else. Although, we don't know the something else. That's going to be the first card revealed. That's the general structure of what you're doing. On your turn, you either play a card from your basic card or from your deck and then add a new card, or you play a card from your reserve cards. These do not get replenished, or you play cards from your discard. We haven't talked about how cards get to discard, but you put could play the top card of your discard and then discard two more cards from your deck. That's important because your your your deck is effectively your life in the game. It's one of the ways you're going to win or lose the game. The other way is if you do if you finish the game, you find the fort, and you actually did not complete all the rules, which we'll get to soon, that's the other way you lose. But otherwise, losing your cards from your deck. Running out of cards in your deck is going to be how you lose.

5:43 So, playing cards from your discard helps you get cards back that were in your discard, but you have to do so by discarding two more cards. So, you get one back, you lose two, your life is slowly being depleted. That's going to be the main thing you do on your turn. There's a bunch of other things you can do on your turn. The main one that's very relevant to note is you could remove a card from the grid, paying the current penalty cost, which is equal to wherever you're up to over here, which would start as one, but now, because we're at a 3x3 grid, the penalty cost is two. So, in other words, if I see that my partner played a card that violates my rule in some way or violates any rule, at that point, I could be like, "Okay, we're going to remove that card from the grid." So, let's go ahead and let's just remove let's pretend there's a card. Let's pretend he played in fact, I have a mushroom. No, let's grab a card from him. Let's take a a berry. My berries need to know that won't work. Let me find one that's better. Uh, let's say a a this. Okay, great. If I play this card, my partner plays this card over here. Even though I could add a water later, I could just say, I'm going to remove this card and pay the current penalty cost and discard two cards into my discard pile instead. Although, of course, that now gives me cards in my discard pile that I could play. So, effectively, you're trying to build a grid that does a few things. It matches your own rules because every single thing has to be present and matching to your rules. Has to match your partner's rules, which you don't necessarily know, but you could try to deduce. And has to match the public rules, which were set at the beginning of the game. things like you can only have one mud per row and column. A second mud would violate that rule. As you build up the grid to a 3x3 and a 4x4 and onwards, you are slowly going to be revealing elements.

7:06 The first and the third element are going to go go towards telling you where your fort is. Which means until you get to a 5x5 grid, you don't even know where the fourth could legally be, which means you're inherently floundering around. Your second, third, your second, fourth, and fifth elements go here where you can start taking cards back from your discard if you match those bonus elements. So if I play flowers now, I can get a card back from my discard shuffling back in my deck. Although also when we do that, when we build a card such that we are now working our way towards a 4x4. Let's go ahead and do that so we can see this. Now that I have a 4x4 being built, let's place this out. Boom. We've now hit a 4x4. As soon as you play that, you're going to take a monster, putting it onto that card. And now when you play cards into a monster's row or column, you have to discard cards from your deck. So again, that's your life force slowly draining. Eventually when you when you hit a 5x5, you're going to reveal this next element. And now we know the fort has to be next to berries and mushrooms. And once you have a berry and mushroom set up, so let's go ahead and grab a mushroom card. Let's take one of these. Let's find one here.

7:59 Once you have a berry and mushroom set up, if I can grab a mushroom. Then for example, let's place this over here. Like so. Uh we can now place a fort over here because it'll be next to orthogonally adjacent to a berry and a mushroom. But in order to do that, you do have to have all 10 elements in play. So, you can't just avoid the problem of matching all the rules by not having those terrain types. You have to have all terrain types in play in order to actually fulfill the goal. And all the rules, both yours, your opponents, your teammates, yours, your teammates, and the boards have to all be legal placements of the board. If this was complicated, I get it. This was not the easiest game for me to learn. It was not the easiest game for me to teach. But once you start playing, it all makes sense pretty quickly. And the good news is once you're done with that, once you win the game for the first time, you're going to unlock ability cards for your specific characters. If we're playing with Clark over here in Sak Joa, we can go through this and grab an ability card that gets added to their available pool of cards. That gives something that they can do that's special. So over here we have you can discard this card to move a card on the map to an adjacent fake in space that's still connected. Let you fix mistakes without having to discard cards while keeping cards in play that you might need. But once you start adding those, the flip side is you also start adding hazards. Each of those cards has a sun value in the top corner, usually one or two. And then you're going to add hazards until you get to the total of the sun values used by the players in the game, which again, as you add abilities, is going to be more. So, you're getting stronger in the game, but these rules, these hazards, which add more monsters. When a 4x4 is achieved, swap threes above it with any on the

9:29 rules board. So, suddenly the rules change. You have to match that up. You have all these rules that are being added to the game equal to the number of ability cards you have. Well, the numeric value of them. So, it's basically a roguelike experience to a degree where your characters are getting stronger, but then in turn you add hazards that make the game more complicated to actually win. That is basically how you play Core of Discovery Duo. It is a logical game in which you are trying to figure out the rules and how to make it all work as you place cards. It's also a management game of managing your resources, managing which cards are in front of you to make all that work using the logic. And then lastly, it's a collaborative hidden communication game where I have to pick up on the things that you are doing as my partner and you have to pick up on the things that I am doing so that we can be efficient with our deck of cards before we run into trouble and start running out of things and uh just having a harder and harder time winning the experience. And with that, it's time to dive into my review of what I like, don't like, and can see others not liking. Starting off with what I like.

10:22 One of my favorite things about this game is being able to do deduce what my teammate has in mind as they play the game based on the choices they make. assuming you're playing with somebody who is being mindful about the choices they make, not just for themselves, but how those their choices will be read into by their teammate, you. So, you're playing somebody who's hopefully on the same wavelength as you, but I'm like, "Oh, you just place that there. You wouldn't have done that. Therefore, you probably don't want you probably want water and vines in the same row cuz that makes sense." And then you can try to test that to a degree by playing things that support your hypothesis and seeing if your teammate does or doesn't tear those things down. Meanwhile, as the grid is growing, at first it seems pretty easy. The penalty costs are low, there's no monsters in play, but as the grid starts to grow, the monsters enter play and the penalties become higher, which means suddenly everything becomes significantly trickier to manage. If you want to test hypothesis in this game, do so before the grid grows too much because the penalties for doing so are much, much weaker. If you're not sure if that ru was or wasn't the rule, test it while it's a 3x3 grid and only lose one card as opposed to when there's monsters in play and suddenly putting everything out is more expensive and the penalties are higher for doing so. So, you're trying to balance all these rules.

11:28 You're trying to balance your rules, the board's rules, and your teammate's rules while trying to figure out your teammate's rules. And because that's a part of it as well. It's not just about figuring out the rules. Even once I perfectly figure out my teammates's rules, we still have to do the thing. We still have to make it all come together, which in some games will be a little easier and some games will be harder trying to balance. Okay, I'm running low on cards and we now have a rock there. The rocks have to be diagonally adjacent to water. That rock is diagonally adjacent to water, but this one isn't. So, we need to get water. The problem is you've used your reserve water. We don't have any water. I could try to gather gather a card from the discard. I could shuffle that back into my deck or I could try to use an ability if I started my ability cards. There's so many tools at your disposal, but you do have to make it all work. So, it's both a deduction game, a limited communication game. And then I'm making it all come together as you go through it. And then once you do all that, you start unlocking abilities with your for your characters. You suddenly have more that your characters can do, but also you add, and this is my favorite part, you make the game harder on yourself. It's my favorite part because we're going to get into the things I don't like, but to me, this game has been the least satisfying when it's not challenging.

12:26 And personally, I found that you need to start introducing the hazards for it to feel challenging. Meaning, yes, it's true that as you win, your characters level up, so to speak. But personally, I found that the board's leveling up is stronger than your leveling up. And that means as you win, you you're kind of dealing with harder and harder challenges because you're getting you're getting this much stronger and the board's getting that much stronger. So, overall, I enjoy the additional challenges. And there's a lot of them. There's a whole deck full of hazards. All these giving you different rules that make the game more difficult in addition to the advanced side, which adds a small level of difficulty as well. Nothing too crazy over there. Lastly, there's lots of options to get you out of a tight spot. Whether it's the abilities you have from your from your characters, or whether it's just being able to like, you know, pull a card from your discard pile, which you can do. Again, there's all these things. The fact that you have a reserve line of your core, like remember when I said when I played that water and said like I wouldn't typically do that that early.

13:15 Happens to me that was a good play to teach my opponent uh my teammate. I keep saying opponent instinctively. You teach my teammate what my water is, but most of the time I find that keeping those cards in reserve for when you really really need them can be incredibly helpful because otherwise like you can get to a pinch where you really need a resource that you just don't have easy access to anymore. As far as things I don't like in the game, first of all, unlocking character, this is a small nitpick. Unlocking character cards with the same character you played in kind of gives you an incentive to keep playing the same character as opposed to exploring other characters. And I do find that in particularly I mean that is the nature of rogue lights to a large degree. If you ever play any rogue light very often sometimes you unlock things as a genre like you're like oh the game you unlock these weapons in the game. Like if you play video game or board game rogue lights sometimes you're unlocking stuff in general. Sometimes you are unlocking stuff based on the character. You're like oh that character now has these new things. And in this game your character has the new cards which is is fine. I like the individuality it gives. But it means that after I play game one, I both want to try new logic puzzles, but I also want to try the character now with the escalation. So that's a minor aspect to the game and I almost I almost don't want to. Like between you and me, I would probably never go back to basic level zero of a character. I would probably unlock from a character and then give my characters like one or two abilities and then start off from there.

14:29 But like you it's your game. You do what you want. You don't you don't have to follow the rules. But I do find that going back to ground zero on a new character is exciting. But I do want to try the Again, this is a minor npick. These are fixable issues. That's a small thing. I'll say that to me, the bigger issue is more of a genre one where I do find this game drifts a bit more towards the limited communication element of the game as opposed to the deductive element of the game. Both are in play. Uh like Core Discovery before at the original game, the original game was both deduction, but also resource management. This one feels like it's three things: deduction, resource management, and limited communication. As we try to vibe together, figuring things out. I do find it just a bit more towards that lane than it does to the deduction. And for me, Core of Discovery was a game that I loved the deduction the most about the game. As far as I can see others not liking, you can get stuck with combos of abilities. Like not actually stuck. I don't think the game lets you do that, but there are certainly things that are harder to manage both in terms of the way your cards come out as well as the rules on the public board and private boards that might make things a bit more challenging to make it all sync up. So, nothing too crazy. and the hazards as well. If you have certain hazards in play, with certain deductive aspects, with certain cards, all that come together to make some games very, very challenging and some games a walk in the park. I played this game several times now. And my first experience was like the easiest game ever where I was like, "Okay, this is like this I understand there's a pool here, but I just I didn't feel challenged." And I still I still don't know if that was just like the luck of how things happen to play out, but my first game was way too easy. And then subsequent games were a mix a mix of like easier experiences and harder experiences. I think it's one of those games where the way things come together

16:01 or even just your access to resources can produce wildly different experiences in that difficulty aspect. And then lastly, you need both players on the same wavelength. If you are playing with somebody who's trying to figure it all out and another player who's just placing cars, not worrying about the impact, not only are you more likely to not win the game, but for the player who's trying to be on the same page, the player who's trying to do everything right, it will be an incredibly frustrating experience watching you just play cards willy-nilly, ruining everything as you go while they desperately try to make it all work for you. As far as final thoughts on Core of Discovery Duo, this was a tricky one for me to give a rating score on. And I'll come back to the rating score shortly, but I'll say that I very much appreciate how they managed to make a game that is completely different. It's like a very distinct game. This is not like, oh, you could play Core Discovery two players cuz you can play Core Discovery two players. This is Core of Discovery Duo.

16:48 It is a two-player experience that feels like it built on Core of Discovery while being very, very different. So, it's familiar yet different, which is my opinion, the best way to do a two-player version of a game. Is that familiar yet different? You don't want people thinking, why did I need a two-player version of a game that I already play at two players? Uh I'm looking at you Azul and others but uh yeah they did a great job as far as that it is familiar. It's in the universe. It is distinct and yet utilize the same mechanisms. Amazing job there. Overall my biggest hangup on it is the fact that the my favorite parts of core of discovery are in here and they added other elements that I enjoy but not as much as I enjoy Core of Discovery. And that also factors into my rating uncertainty on this one. That combined with the fact that I've had some games that felt really challenging and rewarding and some games that felt like, okay, yeah, we did it, but like we knew we were going to do it either way, that difficulty in the difficulty disparity and the inconsistency of it.

17:39 Overall, I'm going to come in at a 3.5 out of five. I did hesitate cuz I think some plays definitely deserve that slightly higher four out of five rating, but I'm looking at an overall consideration. And overall consideration, I'm coming in at a 3.5 out of five. I do think there's a lot to enjoy here, but I definitely think I'm a bigger fan of its older brother. As far as other game recommendations, obviously Core Discovery. I think Core Discovery is fantastic. Utilizes several mechanisms you see here, but focuses much more on really trying to figure out the puzzle and a bit more leaning towards the resource management. And then also check out Decorum. If you are looking for games that kind of have you trying to vibe and figure out each other's rules as you play, Dorm is one of the games that has done that I think most in the best and one of the better ways. Dorm from Floodgate Games is one that's worth checking out. And then I mentioned that AllPlay is a channel sponsor. If you go to allplay.com, you you can check out games both from AllPlay themselves as well as a variety of their partner publishers. And if you're in the US, there's $4 flat rate shipping no matter what you get. But you can go ahead and check out Sale and even Sale Legacy, although I don't think that one's out yet. But if you're looking for games that have you trying to vibe as far as figuring out that hidden communication aspect or the limited communication while trying to work together, then Sale is definitely going to fit that bill. In any case, and until next time, I'm Alex Radcliff from Board Gameco. I hope you enjoyed this video and as always I hope you have a good