Expeditions - Playthrough & Review

[@Noah-qh4ds]

Really goes to show how subjective preference is because this looks RIGHT up my alley and watching the gameplay was very exciting to see how it works.

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Totally nailed it! I'm glad you found it exciting and I hope you get to play!

[@sergewhite539]

LOL about Scythe story - Scythe was first game for me and my 10 years old that time son. Perfect game for start, right! My son was fallen in love with Scythe world and in high school for one English assessment he wrote short story about that Japanese character and her monkey - task for assessment was to write only start of the story but in the way the reader wants to read what's going on further. Son got very high marks for that. And after that his English teacher called me because he was so intrigued what's going on after in the story and what all those things are about, I said to him "now you feel our pain - we all want to know what and why was going on there" :)

[@fredericbarbe]

You guys really nailed down the art of the playthrough. The flow was fantastic and the explanations clear and the rationale behind each decision was both brief and insightful. Thank you so much for your good work!

[@ryanwerry]

This game screams story mode! Would love to see a story like expansion for the completing quests portion of the game and picking up the explore tokens. Great run through! You guys are some of the first gamers I look at for games!

[@DaletheCasualGamer]

Great teach and play! Thanks!

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Glad you liked it!

[@anthonychilds8193]

I love that Tarkovsky is name checked in this game. His & the Strugatsky's influence and vision continue to be given homage in computer games and board games (not to mention modern film and novels; which of course I just mentioned). This game/art is quite beautiful. And like the show (and books) Tales From The Loop, I love the juxtaposition of technology out of its perceived natural time frame. Also in this game, it's quite interesting there are dark themes, terminology, and very dark art / characters, but there is no actual violence / battles. Took me a while 75 min into the episode before I fully realized this. Thanks for the video / gameplay!

[@TyvanTV]

I been waiting 84 years for this. Thanks!! ❤🙏

[@BeforeYouPlay]

lol!!

[@ertai222]

🤭

[@jcontino8889]

29:18 I believe the "asterisk" benefit for gathering on that space allows you to take just *one* benefit of an adjacent space - so you could either rescue or draw, but not both. Great playthrough and teach so far! Love all your videos!

[@stephanhoffmann6216]

That’s right. Because the symbol means get 1 (and only one) benefit from an adjacent location.

[@henribcosta]

Great playthrough! The theme is a little weird on the "expeditions" because you keep moving in circles instead of moving forward and exploring and then it keeps repeating until it's over.

[@CameronPosh]

Have you played scythe? how do they compare for you?

[@henribcosta]

@@CameronPosh I've played Scythe once, I think. And keep in mind I haven't played Expeditions. I guess scythe is more a game of euro style optmization, while expeditions is more of an engine building card game, with more connections to Terraforming Marks, Ark Nova and Earth etc.

[@AhmedAbdulMoniem]

29:01 I guess they should have selected only 1 icon (benefit) from any adjacent location. But they used 2 icons (benefits)? Correct me if I am wrong.

[@donnakeferlis1649]

Interesting idea 1:33:40 A die roll with perhaps a choice accompanied by flavor text... 🤔 Naveen Variant? Or perhaps it'll be in the much anticipated Naveen Expansion 🤞

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Haha, I could never design a game. It would be nice for those map token to have a little more spice beyond collecting them.

[@Danathon80]

This was a very eloquent play through. After watching a few different ones on KZbin, I got more from your video than any of the others explaining how to play (even including you know who's)

[@Danathon80]

Also, I love that at 39:20, Jamey Stegmaier cats, Biddy and Walter, make an appearance 🐈 🐈

[@teejleague3838]

One of my friends' all time faves is Scythe, and they are so excited about this one. Thank you so much for this!!!

[@briantyndall2363]

Awesome playthrough! I'm looking forward to getting this.

[@oceanevicente]

Awesome video as always !!!! Loved the playthrough, can't wait to play (we just received it yayy) !! Thanks guys, you are awesome

[@HexStarDragon]

We just played this yesterday at 4, and enjoyed it. I definitely want to play again, because I know I can do better a second time around!

[@AzOnez]

The play through & review I've been waiting for the most! Love you guys! Now excuse me while I watch the video :)

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Thank you!! Hope you enjoyed the video!

[@TiagoRamosVideos]

Great! 👌

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Thank you! Cheers!

[@olivertremel9869]

Love your playthroughs. Love your reviews. Love you guys! 🥳

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Thanks so much!

[@davidlovejoy1558]

Absolutely brilliant you guys explained your play through carefully and meaningful, I love the game and own both Expeditions and scythe with all expansions and really enjoy both. Keep up the good work nice and clear explanation Thank you and merry Christmas

[@nykandrusiakmusic]

Appreciate other people seeing how minimal the theme was despite the world design (thought I was on an island) This game felt like only mechanisms and points. Maybe was a more noticeable problem for me as I was sitting at the table with all the hexes and cards upside down to me so I didn't really read any of the location or card names, but all that mattered to me were the symbols. I won, but it felt a bit shallow as I don't know what winning even meant aside from I had $1 more than one of my opponents.

[@JEV03]

This playthrough was fun to watch and looked fun to play. Not sure if that’s the correct takeaway based on everyone else’s comments here but I kept wanting to be like “ok let me take over for you now!” and jump right in which is normally how I feel when watching a playthrough of a game I end up enjoying.

[@mmwiggersable]

Loved the playthrough! At 57:00, Naveen did not take his gather action, he only solved his companions worker bonus and he could've either taken 1 power 1 guile or boasted again. :) Not sure if this could've affected his overall scoring but it's definitely a possibility that if he gained that extra power + guile, he may have made different choices later. probably overall doesn't affect too much though.

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Thanks for the heads up! We went ahead and added a Klingon subtitle for the goof. I think I (Naveen) was in big trouble either way lol!!

[@mmwiggersable]

I think he was too hehe

[@lhorbrum1818]

Love your videos. Game seems very solo'ish, but i can't help but want it regardless! wish the mech boards token track was wider though!

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Thank you so much! Hope you get to try it out.

[@B_bot]

This is like my third video watching from you guys, with my favorite being Lisboa.

[@kevincornell2811]

Great playthrough. Looks very fun and the artwork is just as amazing as Scythe!

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Thanks Kevin!!

[@AndrewLaValley]

Cant wait for this game to come in. Thanks again for the playthrough!

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Excited for you!!

[@redstation9765]

Nice game !!!

[@bmrigs]

Love watching you two. She always starts out like she is in trouble but then overtakes you at the end. And there is always a point during the game where you realize that you are going to lose. LOL

[@chestersleezer8821]

Great video, I got my first play of this on Friday and like most first throughs there were some learning moments and questions. This video helps a lot and our 2nd play through will be a lot smoother. I did have the same combo that Naveen had in Mech and Characters and what I did learn was that you need both cards and workers. Oh and when given the chance to gain coins you should take it I.E. when Naveen played the cat and was at 10 power.

[@georgemikhail5311]

Have you played Vindication? If so how does this compare? Is it similar?

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Naveen is a fan of Vindication (minus the potential for hidden end game). The exploration of face down hexes is the only true similarity though.

[@Boardgametherapist]

Excited when it was announced. Fell flat for me after reading the rule book. I feel like a lot of newer SM games have been missing a certain edge lately. They feel too…safe? Good but there isn’t enough of the extra hook to make it a great game.

[@RaduStanculescu]

I don't know if you've played the expansion in the meantime, but it adds a wild worker that each player has from the start, starting resources (varying from mech to mech, but I think it's a total of 5 in the two different colors), a "corrupted mech" which is a neutral mech with easy manipulation that can interact with the players (and you can fight with, essentially getting corruption cards which are mostly equivalent to the tokens), and the map tokens from the map give you instant benefits. So it's both more interactive and shorter than the base game. I think it's definitely worth looking into it if you want to replay the game. I only played it with the expansion and I don't think I'd ever want to play without.

[@Cissewis]

Thanks for another lovely video Monique and Naveen!

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Thank you too!

[@lincolnjosefraga265]

The game sounds fascinating,. What holds me back is being locked out of a n action you need and the sitting and blocking on a spot so someone cant achieve a goal or vice versa. That sounds way frustrating and kind of petty. TY for your excellent review

[@JEV03]

Skipped to the review because all the comments were saying you hated it and that had me worried (I don’t normally watch/read reviews because they tend to have the opposite of the intended effect on me but I’ve found yours helpful in the past). But if your final thoughts are “enjoyed it but not more than Scythe” that doesn’t sound so bad, I figured that was going to be my feeling when the game was announced months ago. Since I’m going into it wanting “an exploration game inspired by Scythe” and not “bigger better Scythe” I’m hopeful I won’t be disappointed. Curious whether the time thing is gonna be an issue to me, honestly before I got experienced in Scythe the pace you described is exactly how Scythe felt to me, crawling early game, sprinting late game. I’ll have to come back and watch your playthrough which is what I really came here for until I started seeing the comments. If people don’t like this game I’ll just be careful about bringing it up just like I am with Tapestry, Pendulum, or Explorers of the North Sea.

[@lessssst8898]

@53:18 you get coins because of even numbered location? I thought you do other cards ability only if they are your items attached to your player board...?😮

[@CB-yh3db]

@BeforeYouPlay - do you two ever use a numerical system to rate games? BGG uses a 1-10 scale. Interested to know where this game would rank next to Scythe on a numerical rating scale.

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Hi there, no we never have. We both like Scythe (Top 5 game for both of us) > Expeditions for sure. Scythe is in that 9-10 rating. I think Monique may rate this one a 6.5-7.0 and I (Naveen) would rate it a 7.0-7.5

[@QtNFluffyBacon]

This game looks so interesting. I love Scythe, I love the flavor and gameplay, but this seems so completely different. One thing that I love about scythe is the engine building it includes. How do you feel about that aspect here? You mentioned it connected to the items and meteorites, but the engine building seems very limited, no? Either way, thanks for the video, a delight as always!

[@1ch4lM]

I don't much like Scythe, maybe if I played it more I would come to appreciate it. This game looks a lot more interesting to me. I think it's really nice to have different kinds of games from one universe, though.

[@jogumby]

I'm the opposite right now from Monique, I was not a fan of Scythe but this looks much more interesting. Can't wait to try it! (sorry if I spelled your name incorrectly ;))

[@torstenkock7265]

I like games that are driven by cards and worker placement, but I dont think that this game will make it on my table. I cannot even tell why, but its not what I expected it to be and some of the mechanics look even boring (collecting map tokens, without anything special happening when collecting them). Love the playthrough.

[@pubbles3229]

seems similar to when people tried to compare Twilight Inscription to Twilight Imperium. It's just two completely different games, but I guess it draws in customers to market them like that

[@joshford886]

So is this one that stays in your collection and gets plays or will it be moving on?

[@dogf4ther]

My question is do I pre order this as not available in NZ yet or the the Witcher old world , as big fan of that world but also a huge fan on scythe. Hard choices but I have not play tested any 😢

[@queparkerqp]

Do you think the 2player game would benefit if you added the solo variant? To Simulate an 3 player game.

[@BeforeYouPlay]

We didn't look into the solo/automa. Now I'm super curious to see how it works and see if it would assist!

[@henribcosta]

I guess the abilities are kind of balanced because it's a card driven game. They can be more useful or not if the cards draw are aligned with them. But sometimes you can make powerful combos, like Monique did in this game.

[@monkeyunit4533]

Is it me or is that resources track too narrow to comfortably use both trackers on?

[@monkeyunit4533]

Having seen the entire video, this feels a bit like Revive to me, in both theme and how it plays. Revive looks more interesting tho.

[@Halcyonbane7]

Monique cheated at 1:02:35 by giving herself an extra guile XD EDIT: guess it doesn't matter though because she never used guile after that and she kept going above 10 =p

[@mikeharman4257]

Why is the box so BIG?

[@Vonkater]

How many mech maps and characters does the game comes with also how many mech minis that you move with ? Nice video you two so polite and good chemistry. 😉👍

[@massimilianocito2955]

what you see are the only exagonal map in the whole game

[@taxag1134]

I played about 10 games of scythe and decided that, while I enjoyed the simplicity of the mechanics and the theme/art, I thought the choices were a bit too obvious. Scythe almost felt like a game that played itself after the first few turns, unless you suffered a lot of interference from other players (which never seemed to be the case from my experience). I feel like, due to this being a card-driven game where each card is unique and you dont know what is going to come up in any given game, that the choices are a bit more open-ended and therefore I might enjoy it a bit more.

[@salbertron]

Hopefully I like this more than SCYTHE.

[@TyvanTV]

Impossible

[@zhivik]

A small note: I believe Monique played her item card incorrectly - the one that gave her VP per map token from an odd or even tile. She should have gained that ability only after she upgraded that card, which she never did. However, the point difference at the end was big enough not to matter, as I believe Monique got about a dozen points from that card, and the difference was more than 20. Still, it would have been a much tighter score at the end. Regarding the game, I am disappointed that the Scythe setting was not utilised more. You can easily attach a totally different setting and no one would notice (like snow sleds instead of mechs, treasures instead of meteorites, the Arctic instead of the Scythe universe, etc.) It is also sad that the game doesn't scale for player count, as the number of tiles used could have been simply reduced at a lower player count (as a lot of games utilising tiles do). However, the biggest drawback for me is that it is not really an interesting game, as there is simply nothing that stands out, both in terms of theme or mechanics. The action selection mechanism is probably the most interesting part, but the actions themselves - not really. At that game weight, I would rather play something like Earth, which I feel is more thematic, has more interesting mechanics and costs about two thirds of what Expeditions does (I checked at my FLGS). In a nutshell, I agree that this feels like Scythe lite, with the more interesting and entertaining mechanics stripped away, like encounters, which I also miss a lot. A hard pass for me, I am afraid.

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Actually, item cards have two benefits, one instant and another ongoing, which are both activated once the card is played to the card row with a worker placed on top. Upgrading a card makes the ongoing benefit permanent without the use of a worker, and scores you points at the end of the game,. Unfortunately for me, it seems Monique played the card correctly. Thank you for sharing your insights on the game! We always enjoy hearing from you and definitely agree on multiple aspects.

[@Ignition2310]

It’s a grey one. Seems super over powered that you gain a map instantly AND utilise the secondary ability “whenever you gain a map” at the same time. It’s two powers at once. Surely not the intention - otherwise why even say “whenever you gain a map”. It’s superfluous if you are immediately getting a map every time. I agree you logically played it as it reads… and it’s quite likely correct. But it’s a grey area. Further to this I’m really underwhelmed having just revived my copy. The production is absolutely stellar! It’s gorgeous. But it feels like a big budget Hollywood movie remake/sequel. All budget and looks, no plot. Maybe not that bad but still… I love Jamie’s work. And this threatens to be a good game at the start - but ultimately is just dudes running around a gorgeous map in circles, not interacting with each other and with no real point other than to Hoover up coins. Eg Tarkovskys lair - what an anti-climax. I think this game needs area control. Something thematic to Indiana Jones where the nazis took over the dig site in Egypt. If not that that anything to add in more player interaction. Also needs a more climatic ending - eg I found the arc of the covenant - not I got back and boasted the most before anyone else…

[@dimmok8344]

@@Ignition2310it is the intention because it is an on going effect. You just get the benefit right away if you play the card and place a worker on it. Also there maybe times where you play a card without having a worker for it in which case it does nothing but give you its core values. This also is affected by other cards that may use effects of cards in play.

[@shawns3911]

And how does it compare to Inheritors?

[@BeforeYouPlay]

I need to snag a copy of that game! I really enjoyed it!

[@shawns3911]

@@BeforeYouPlay why would you not share the best game of strategicon and the year with Monique?!

[@raymyers700]

Thanks for this review. I laughed when you talked about Jamey's designs and story. I really believe (just my own opinion) that Jamey WANTS to tell a story that with any aspect: the player can expound upon his his/her own mind. Even with Rise of Fenris...I think it tells a story that basically could spawn 1000 more. To me, it's kind of like reading a book: each of us could read the exact same chapter but if you were able to envision it in your mind and put it on a screen: all three would be WILDLY different. I believe Jamey wants to create that same kind of experience rather than tell the same 'intro/conflict/climax/conclusion' story

[@HITFORDCYCLE1]

I felt kind of trapped in Scythe. It took 4 or 5 turns to get to where I wanted to. I could not got to some Terrains even after I could cross a river. Producing was kind of mid. Encounters were cool but in a 5 Or 6 player game, it only happens once or twice per player.

[@FPchie]

THis game more suited for solo or 2 players max. Its just each player in their own bubble doing their own thing. No player interactions at all.

[@Asaloy]

Thanks for the great explanation and the playthrough. Kept me from buying it. Too boring solitaire gameplay for me. I would definitely try it, but not blindly buying it.

[@antonvitus8024]

Played it for the first time yesterday! Our first play with three people took over 3 hours haha! I hope to bring it down a bit once we know the stragedy better. I honestly really enjoyed expeditions. Scythe is my favorite game of all time and I didn’t expect this to be as good or similar to it. And it’s not. But it’s still really enjoyable I think! 4/5 ⭐️

[@SuperWilliamW]

I appreciate your rather negative review of this game. I felt the same disappointment as someone who is a huge fan of scythe. I'd say this game would probably be more fun for people who have not played scythe before, or newer gamers

[@nihlify]

I disagree. You can love this style of game even when you love Scythe and the "newer gamers" make no sense. I would definitely say it has very little do to Scythe, so your love or hate for that game have no relevance to if you love this game. Also hilarious to imply it wouldn't be honest if they had been more positive...

[@kajukuja]

🙂👍

[@jamestriplett5854]

i must be early, its 360p :)

[@BeforeYouPlay]

2008 release date 😂.

[@Stormzbowler]

I'm curious about your comments that this is a long game. You mention all your plays are over 90 minutes but your actual game time in this video is only 65 minutes and that was with you explaining and talking through your turns. Even at 90 minutes, that's quite a bit quicker than a game of Scythe which is one of the major draws to this game for me.

[@BeforeYouPlay]

The play time in this video came down to editing, the actually gameplay footage was about 100+ish minutes. We think with all seasoned player the game could be faster, but its one of those games that with more players it will add to the time. Our 3-Player plays were hitting the 2 hour mark.

[@TheEricBooth]

Psych. No Klingon subtitles. They must have got it perfect.

[@ralex3697]

Scythe

[@BeforeYouPlay]

Had to add a correction after all. I (Naveen) forgot to take a "Gather" Action at one spot.

[@21cabbage93]

Don’t know how this game is the same price as scythe, crazy

[@Noah-qh4ds]

Costs a lot to produce a board/card game. Hope this helps

[@Haunt1013]

It’s killing me that I can’t read your shirt. It’s something days, I think.

[@BeforeYouPlay]

LOL It says, "Fridays"

[@elqord.1118]

It’s a well made game that ultimately feels underwhelming from what I have seen. I doubt it will leave a mark in the hobby.

[@shoruk]

That's what Scythe felt like to me when I played it for the first time - the fact that this game allows what happened at the end to happen leaves me with a sour taste as well... it's never fun to watch someone snowball away without anything for you to do about it. . .

[@massimilianocito2955]

too long, too bland , too slow, too repetitive. totally based on hype. scythe was definitely much better, hope to be able to sell it. btw nice video as always