Uncharted Passage: Remastered Review: Topsy Scurvy
Transcript
Hey there everybody, it's Mike Delisio and today I'm going to be taking a look at Uncharted Passage Remastered from designer Bong Wong Ju and publisher Pluto Games. This is an updated version of an earlier game called Uncharted Passage that I had never played, but I have played some more recent games from this designer that I was very excited about. Magic Number 11, which was a soccer themed card game and most recently President Maker, which was a very interesting politically themed kind of push your luck kind of game with some very interesting things going on. This is primarily a solo game, although it can be played with two. This review is really focusing on the solo uh aspect of the game, which is really the main way to play it. Let's head down to the table, I'll show you how it plays, then we'll come back here and I will let you know what I think.
Okay, here we see Uncharted Passage set up on the table. Your goal in the game is to get as much prestige as you can, which is measured by this marker along this track over 12 rounds of the game. Each round represents a month and every round, every month, you're going to be placing one of your ship markers on the board. That's a way to track the rounds. The other way to track the rounds is that you're going to start with a logbook sheet and on this logbook sheet, you're essentially going to be keeping all of the information that occurred during that year and the 12 months, the 12 rounds of the game, along with some trackers for your ship health, your health, and a place that you can keep track of the commodities that you buy and sell throughout the game. All right, I'm showing you how the solo game plays.
This is a game that can be played with one or two players. The two-player game can be either cooperative or competitive, but it really is all based off of the solo game system. So, this is really showing you how the game is played. You have a player aid card here that's going to kind of show you the main phases of the game and what happens. You're going to have a planning phase, a pirate phase, and a sailing phase, finally ending with an anchoring phase every round. Um and you'll do that 12 times. There also is a card here that shows you how final scoring is going to work. Okay? The general idea is that you uh at the beginning of the game during setup would gather a certain number of these cards that come out of these three decks, the route deck, the trade deck, and the discovery deck. Those are random. Two of the route, three of the trade, and four of the discovery cards are laid out face up in front of you. You are trying to achieve these uh kind of goals, missions throughout the game. And as you might expect, these are about taking particular routes. So, let's just look at this example. This is the Northwest Passage route. And it's saying that you want to be able to to go from the port of Tacoma to the port of Cohasset and going via that Northwest Passage as it shows you on the card itself. So, essentially, you want to have a ship marker here and here by the end of the game going through this passage here. And if you do
so, then you would be able to complete this card. You're going to get uh the prestige listed at the bottom and you'd get a couple of port card, which comes from these deck. They're one-time ability cards that you can use at any point in the game. All right. So, let's just run you through a round. The first thing you're going to do is reveal a voyage card. And so, this was a randomly constructed deck where you have six level one voyage cards, a mid-game event card, and then six level two voyage cards. So, you flip this card over and it's going to give you some information. First, it's going to give you a little bit of a thematic title, Wind and Waves. It's going to give you a condition uh of some sort that you have to deal with that month or that round. In this case, what it's telling us is that you have to put a value of at least three in the um sailing speed, and I'll talk about what that means. Down here, it tells you how the pirates are going to be attacking you this round. Here, what it's saying is you're going to roll two dice for the pirates, add those, and the sum is going to be the amount they attack you for. The big thing you also need to look at is this number up here.
This is essentially telling you you have 11 resources to allocate. Okay, so let's talk about that. You have three areas that you're going to be allocating resources to every round, and it's the the number you have is going to be determined by the journey card. So, among these three values here, I am going to be allocating 11. And I was told that in this round, it has to be uh a four or higher going into the ship speed because it says greater than three. And so, what I'll do is I will write in a value for each of these, making sure that the ship uh sailing speed is higher than three. So, four, five, or six because you have to put uh the maximum of six in each of these. So, the three values are ship speed. It's telling you how far you're going to be traveling or able to travel. You don't have to go up to the full value you have put there.
Then, the next one here is cruise uh stamina, and finally, the armament. Okay? So, we'll talk a little bit about those. So, let's say I've got 11 here. I'm going to be allocating. I want to put uh let's say I'll go ahead and put four, which is the minimum value I can put there. All right. That means that, um I've got seven left to play with. Let's say that I go with I know I'm going to be rolling these two dice to to consider the, um pirates and they go from one to three, so they can get a maximum attack of six. If I wanted to really protect myself, I can put a value of six there and know I'm safe either way, but maybe I'll hedge my bets a little bit um and go three there. That gives me a a value of four that I have left in my crew stamina. Okay, so you'll be choosing those every round. And then you're going to go through and this is called the planning phase, right? Where you apply the event, in which my case was having that value in the in the sailing speed, you're allocating. Now, you're going to do the pirate phase, okay? And what you're going to do is you are going to compare the armament level and the pirates combat power, okay? And if their combat power is higher than I have to mark off a X on my ship strength track for each value higher than it is, okay? So, I armament level of three, I know that they're rolling two dice.
They rolled a three, so I am safe. I lucked out. I don't have to mark off on my ship's damage [snorts] board here. As you are going farther down here, you're going to get some greater damage, which is going to cause you to do other things. You can even get to a point where your ship sinks, okay? So, that was the pirate phase. Now, I'm doing the sailing phase. Every game starts in the port of Lisboa. So, I'm going to take one of my ships and I have up to four to spend. Now, looking at this board, when you see these white outlines, you cannot go uh through those. Those are impassable. Also, you see these pirate spots on the board in various spaces. Those you cannot travel through. And and it tells you here, all of the six adjacent spaces to each of these pirate spots are called pirate infested areas and you could sometimes get in trouble if you're in a pirate infested area when these cards flip over. So, you have to know you're taking a bit of a risk there. So, where are you going to go? Well, you've got a couple of different things to think about.
You've got the cards, obviously, that you have. So, you're thinking about maybe routes you want to take. So, maybe I'd start moving towards Cohasset, showing you this Northwest Passage card. You also have the trades. And so, for example, what this card is saying is that you want to get some leather at a port that deals in leather and you want to sell it at this particular port. It also tells you where you can find leather on the map, okay? So, there are three places. One of them happens to be Cohasset. So, maybe it would be a good idea to start traveling in that way, pick up some leather, and then maybe go to Tacoma and then from there, come over down to here. So, maybe I'll do that. So, starting here, I've got up to four to spend. So, I will go 1 2 3 4. Now, you see this little fish here with an exclamation point. That is a discovery spot. Actually, maybe I'm going to do that. 1 2 3 4. Oh, but I'm in a pirate infested water. I'll go here. I'll play it safe. Now, some of these cards are discovery cards and they tell you that if you find if you discover that particular area on the map, you're going to get prestige points and then also you'll add up to three more with a die roll. Unfortunately, none of my discovery cards included this particular spot. If they did, I certainly would have gone there and taken the risk of being in a pirate infested spot and infested spot. Okay, So, so I've done the sailing phase. All
right, I have placed a ship marker and gone up to as far as I could with my sailing speed. Now we're in the anchoring phase. This is going to be handled two different ways. If you're at a port, what you're going to do is you are going to collect gain a prestige point as depicted and then you'll be conducting crew action. So I'll talk about that in a moment. But I'm not in a port. I'm one away from a port. So I am outside of a port which means that I have to do a scurvy check. All right. A scurvy check is when you are going to take the sailed distance versus the crew's stamina. If the crew stamina is lower, you have to mark an X on your health track. Okay? If you're in a discovery space, you can gain prestige from a die roll. So if I had gone there taken that risk, I could have gotten some prestige by rolling a die, but I played it safe and I went here. Also, scurvy, my crew stamina is four as you can see.
Maybe there you can. And I also sailed four. So I am fine. I am covered for scurvy. Not a worry there. Okay? And so that's that. That's the first round. Placed out a marker, sailed. Then you would continue on the same way flipping over pirates raid. Now I lucked out because what this is saying is if I was in a pirate infested area, then the pirates would immediately attack me rolling the two dice and taking the difference. But I was I don't have to face that because I'm outside of a pirate infested area. Now it's telling me the pirates are rolling into attack with one die. Okay? Things along those lines. So when you are in a port, I will show you how that's different. Let's say that I had somehow gotten to or instead of going there, I had come here to Sarah Sierra Leone on my first turn. I would have gained a prestige point as it shows there, and then I would have actions that I could spend in Sarah Sierra Leone. And I have up to four actions, four points of actions. The actions you can take are depicted on your sheet here. Basically, if you have a one, you're not going to be able to do any actions. If you have a strength of two, you can draw one of these port cards. I said these are one-time ability cards.
You can have as many of these as you want. Use them and flip them over. This is letting you reroll, but there's all kinds of different cards in here. This is an end-game scoring card where you want to collect as many of these as possible. Here, you can use it to reduce the the strength of a pirate attack by two, things along those lines. All things that are good for you that are going to potentially give you points or help you against the different things that can happen to you in the game, okay? That's collecting a um a port card. This is saying that you can buy one of the goods that are being traded at that particular port. This is saying you can buy um a good at the port one and get a port card. This is saying that you can buy one good and sell as many as you want and get a port card. And if you have six points here, you're going to you can buy one, sell as many as you want, and gain two port cards. So, if I was in um Sierra Leone and I had a strength of four, that meant that I could um go with what they have, which is salt. I would write that provision right here on this on this side of my scree- uh sheet.
I have salt, and then I would gain a port card, and I would have that in my uh display that I could use whenever I want. If I later go to another port, as long as they're not trading in salt. So, if I were over here in Cohasset, I could sell them my salt. Cross that off, you get a point for every uh provision that you sell, okay? So, that's another way to be gaining prestige is by selling a number of your different provisions. All right? That's the general flow of the game, trying to complete as many of these as you possibly can to gain prestige points. You also will gain prestige points by going to ports, things along those lines. Um there are ways to wrap around the map, and so you can see along here, you've got the letters, and so if I left from D, I would come in from D over here. So, that's a way to allow you to kind of wrap around the map. You don't have to, you know, go from here the long way over there, although maybe you'd be incentivized to do that. At the midway part uh after the first six rounds, you'll flip over an event card, and you're you will kind of be evaluating particular things, and you can get um some prestige points based on that. Then you would have the final six rounds.
And at the end of the game, you're going to be getting, as it says here, prestige prestige points that you earn during the game. You could potentially get end game points from a particular port card in there that is a set collection. You lose points for uh getting to those kind of exploding symbols on [snorts] your uh ship track, and you will also subtract prestige from getting into the symbols on your personal health track as well. At the end, you're going to add all of those up, and you're going to find out what type of an explorer you were. You've got a little score matrix there, and so here's an earlier game that I can that I had played that you can see that shows kind of how I went through those 12 rounds, and I ended up with 36 points, which in the case of this particular game, would have been a mediocre explorer. Checks out. Let's head back up and I will let you know what I think.
All right, so there you have Uncharted Passage Remastered. And um let's just talk a little bit first about the production. Uh it's a really nice production in a small box. This has been um the size, I think uh well, it was the same similar size of President Maker. It's not a huge box, but there's a fair amount of game in here. It has a nice um fourfold bowl board, easy for me to say. Um some wooden pieces that are very nice, a little bit of screen printing on there, but not a whole lot. Doesn't need a whole lot. Quality of the cards are good. Um you know, it is a pad of paper, and so that theoretically could run out. You could also uh laminate them and never have to worry about that, but you'd have to play through a bunch of games uh to do that. Uh so, an overall nice production. The uh the art is uh not flashy at all, but it doesn't need to be. The one downside I would say to the production is just about some of the iconography. Uh it could be a little bit unintuitive, especially as it comes to some of the pirate attacks and things along those lines. It's not anything overwhelming, and and you do have a nice kind of reference right here on the back of this rule book. And so, that kind of mitigates that a little bit, but you are probably consulting that a little bit more than you might want to the first two to three games at least, I would think. Uh but not a whole lot negative
to say as far as the production goes. It it's a really really well done product on that sense. Now, to the gameplay. This is a game that in some way feels like a little bit of a throwback. Um a solo game where you are kind of given a couple of dice some cards and a sheet of paper. Now, the map is out there and that it it is important, but this is not one of those games where you are just inundated with stuff that you're managing and dealing with. It is a pretty simple system where you are flipping over the cards, the journey cards. It's giving you a value to work with, some type of restriction or penalty you might face, and then giving you free reign to kind of do what you want to do with those action points that are whatever they may call them, but it's essentially an action point thing. Where you are putting in three different values.
I love that, right? I I You don't see that as much anymore. It seems to have been kind of replaced by other mechanical systems to drive the game, uh but it works really really well here because often times you're in this situation where it's like I'm having to leave myself vulnerable in in some way to be able to do what I want to do. I want to be able to sail far enough to complete this particular uh route or mission or whatever the case may be, but to do so, I'm leaving myself vulnerable to pirate attacks. Maybe I've picked up enough port cards in the past that I can take that risk and and mitigate some of it. It's really really kind of um like I said, throwback, but it's almost like comfort food. I'm like, yes, this makes sense. It's not complex. It's not convoluted. There's not a lot of upkeep.
There's not a lot of management going on. You really are doing most of your thinking in that planning phase, and then from there, you're kind of trying to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Really, really nice. There's enough variety in the types of missions. I really like the fact that there are three distinct types of things that you are doing in the game, and there's so many of the different cards that you're not going to come across the same kind of lineup ever, I think. I think that's very unlikely where you're going to have the same nine cards come up in a game. I'm sure there's a mathematical equation I don't want to try to figure out, but very unlikely. And so, it feels fresh. It's not a game that outstays its welcome. Those 12 rounds play relatively quickly, but you definitely are doing a lot of thinking.
And so, it's a really nice juxtaposition of very, very simple rules. Not a lot of administration that you're dealing with, but some nice, meaningful choices. And a little bit of risk management that you're taking, and I like that a lot, especially in a solo game. So, it does a lot of things very, very well in a relatively quick amount of time. A nice-looking package. It's a game that I've played several times, and I want to keep coming back to. I I I really think that this is a game that kind of threads that needle between being simple to play, quick to set up, quick to tear down, but having enough active choices that you're making that you really feel like you have played a complete game. It doesn't feel like a filler, even though it plays in about the same time as you could play a filler. Now, I've already mentioned that there is a two-player version of the game that you can play competitive or cooperatively.
Have not played those. Read the rules. They all work off the same system that you saw in the overview. It really is not any drastic change at all between the the one and the two player game. For me, not saying I would never play it as a two player game, sure, I'd give it a shot, but this is really going to be a solo game for me. And as a solo game, I'm giving it an 8.5. I think this game is excellent. It it really just is kind of like this comfort food feel for me. I don't know how else to put it. It feels familiar, but it's not just treading water, pun intended, I suppose. It's a it's a clever system, gets out of its own way, lets you kind of deal with the risk, and make the choices, and then try to utilize those to get the best score you can. Now, I will say, I have mentioned in the past that I don't particularly always love the kind of beat your high score variant, and this has that. But, I've also said that that system [snorts] works in particular games. This is a game where it works. I don't want to go up against an automated opponent in this game. I think that would add a level of administration and upkeep that I don't want. I want to be thinking about what I'm doing in this game. I don't really want to be worrying about what another automated opponent If I'm playing with a player, sure, cuz you got a little bit of that head-to-head type of a thing, unless you're playing cooperative. But, um as a single player game, really well
done, 8.5 out of 10. I'm definitely keeping an eye on this designer after Magic Number 11 I liked uh so much, and President Maker, and now the most recent one I played, which is Uncharted Passage Remastered. All right, that's going to do it for me. This is Mike Delisio. I'll see you on the next one.
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