Discoveries: The Journals of Lewis & Clark is one of two games that came to my attention at around the same time, by the same designer, featuring artwork by the same artist. Due to my enjoyment of Manifest Destiny (a terrific comic book series that features the Lewis & Clark expedition encountering all manner of supernatural monsters during their journey), I had decided that I wanted a Lewis & Clark game.
I spent a little time researching Discoveries and Lewis & Clark: the Expedition, and for reasons I can no longer recall, I decided on Discoveries.
It's a charming little dice-placement game, an emerging game style that combines common Euro-style worker placement game mechanics with dice rolling, so that the roll of the dice determines how limited your choices for worker placement are, rather than competing with other players for available spaces on the board.
Over the course of the game, players use their dice in various combinations to purchase Tribe cards, representing various native tribes encountered by the expedition, and Discoveries cards, depicting terrain features as well as plants and animals to be cataloged. The Tribe cards provide additional options for dice spending that make it easier to purchase Discoveries, which are ultimately how each player earns points towards winning the game.
Spent dice are placed on a board at the center of the table, either to the right or the left depending on what they were used for, and this generates one of the more interesting decision points of the game. Each player has 5 dice of their own color, as well as a number of neutral dice that can be picked up in various ways. A player can forego their normal turn in order to replenish their supply of dice, and when they do, the have two choices: they can either pick up all the dice, regardless of color, on either the left or the right side of the board, or they can pick up all the dice of their color, regardless of whether they are on the central board or in use by another player.
Picking up dice from the board can potentially net you more dice to use, giving you more options on your turn. However, using dice of your opponent's colors is risky since they could take them back at any time. This can be a problem as some of the tasks you spend your dice on need to be carried out over multiple turns, and progress on those tasks is lost if an opponent decides to take back a die that you are using.
I find the game very appealing, and reasonably unique among the games in my collection both in terms of game play and theme. However, I'm still curious about the other Lewis & Clark game...
Rating: 3 (out of 5) It's a fairly simple game, but with some interesting decisions to make and some beautiful artwork to look at.
- Discoveries: The Journals of Louis & Clark official website
- Discoveries: The Journals of Louis & Clark on BoardGameGeek.com