Lewis and Clark: The Expedition Review

Back when America still had a frontier, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led a military expedition into the unexplored west. Called the Corps of Discovery, this famous expedition mapped the young nation's newly acquired territory, made numerous botanical, zoological, and geographical discoveries, and staked a claim on the continent's western coast. Along the way, they established relations with numerous Native American tribes, aided by a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea.

Like its namesake, the board game Lewis & Clark reminds us that there's still unexplored territory worth discovering. With the exception of one or two games a year, the biggest innovations board gamers tend to see are "worker placement with a twist" or "deck building mixed with tile laying." Just when you start to think that board games have nowhere left to go, a game like Lewis & Clark comes along that smashes all your preconceptions of what a Euro-style game can be.

Thumbing its nose at history, Lewis & Clark imagines not one but many Corps of Discovery competing to be the first to reach the Oregon coast. So it's a race game. But not so fast! Players get there by expending canoes to move along the river and horses to move along the two momentum-breaking stretches of mountain (predicting Aquasphere's obstacle-filled victory point track). These resources come from trading in other resources using a worker placement mechanic. So it's a worker placement/resource management game? Not quite. Besides worker placement, players will also be managing a hand of cards, playing some of them face down to "activate" the cards they've played face up, so it's also a San Juan-style hand management game. Except there are also strong incentives to keep your expedition board free of clutters, and there's deck building, and all of this comes with some of the most intense player interaction I've seen in a game that features no attacking or direct conflict.

In truth, Lewis & Clark is any kind of game you want it to be. It can become a race between the mechanics themselves: can your resource engine beat your opponents' finely tuned deck or worker placement strategy? Will you persevere by expanding your expedition board, by building a large, flexible deck, or by keeping everything as trim as possible? How will you deal with the transitions from river to mountain and back again?

All strategies can win you the game, given the circumstances are in your favor. Well, almost all. There was a certain notorious "game-breaking" strategy that got early buyers in a tizzy, but it's been officially errata'd to keep in line with the spirit of the game.

Balancing all these diverse strategies is the all-important "set up camp" action. An expedition across America can't always push forward without rest; to represent this, once you've played a card from your hand (face down or face up), it stays on the table, inaccessible, until you decide to set up camp. Taking an action each turn is mandatory, so if you have no cards to play or workers to place, you have to set up camp. But this comes at a price: excess workers, resources, and unplayed cards in your possession all delay your departure. Each of these items forces you to "lose a day," moving your scout token one space backwards on the river/mountain track for each day lost. Camping at the wrong time can destroy all your progress, especially when you hit those river/mountain transitions (the worst place to find yourself after encampment is one river space away from the start of the mountains).

The camping rules reward efficiency, but you can also go big, building a powerful enough engine to make the lost days irrelevant. If you're going this route, you probably want to take advantage of the "expedition upgrade" worker placement spot, allowing you to pay 3 wood to add additional storage spaces to your expedition. These come in two varieties: you can get a small expansion with no day penalty, or a big one that will lose you a day if used, but either's more efficient than an unupgraded board. Again, you have the flexibility to complement any strategy. Winning players can buy several expansions, one, or none at all.

The same goes for the deck building element. This is a free action, like making camp, that can happen at the start or end of your turn. At any time, there will be five "encounter characters" to choose from out of a deck of 54 unique cards, all representing historical expedition members or those who might have been. Recruiting characters costs fur and equipment. The fur cost scales with how long the card has been available, and the equipment cost scales with the card's power (the number of activations, up to three, it will give you when played face down). You always have the option of discarding one card out of your hand, removing it from the game completely, to get a small discount on the recruitment cost. Again, do you want efficiency or flexibility? Newly recruited characters go straight into your hand—did I mention that you have access to your entire deck at all times, except for the cards already played in front of you?

Strategy is no more important than timing, though. Aside from timing your encampment, you'll need to carefully time your actions in response to your opponents. There's no concept of "your" workers in this game: when you play a worker on the board, it stays there until any player uses their "interpreter" card, giving them the option to move as many workers as they want from the board to their expedition. This means that, in addition to the passive-aggressive blocking that normally goes with worker placement games, you have to worry about whether your opponents will snatch that worker from you, or whether you can snatch theirs. The same level of interaction occurs with the cards. Each one has a badge showing one of the four basic resources; whenever you play a resource-generating card, you multiply its effects by the number of badges matching that resource—in your play area and your neighbors'. It's a game of chicken to see who'll play their lumberjack first, all while trying to move forward efficiently. Every choice impacts every player.

It's the polar opposite of multiplayer solitaire, which may be why the solitaire variant sucks...but with two to four players, it's a quasi-historical hoot.