LogFAQs > #898160295

13. Discoveries: Lewis and Clark
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/171669/discoveries

Genre/mechanics: Dice-rolling, dice assignment, tableau-building, set collection
Rules complexity: 7/10
Game length: 40-60 minutes
Player count: 2-4
Experience: 6 games with 3-4 players over 3 sessions
First played: 2015

Discoveries has you adventuring in the American West and attempting to be the best explorer, measured by (what else?) victory points. The key mechanic to getting points is by completing route cards, which feature mountains and rivers. Your tableau contains the actions you need to take to clear these obstacles. You have a certain number of dice in your pool, showing custom faces such as American Indians, journal symbols, boots, or hooves, and on each turn, you either take new dice (and roll them) or you assign some number of one type of die to an action spot on your tableau. You can expand your tableau by recruiting help from Indian tribes.

Design - Discoveries is beautiful. The art on all the cards is pretty. The art on the common area where your used dice are discarded (and can subsequently be recruited for an action) is pretty. But most importantly of all, your dice are fucking awesome. They're wooden dice, rounded at the corners, and each player has a different color. This color of dice is important because your used dice can be picked up by other players, and you can also get bonus grey dice by recruiting Indian tribes. When you roll a big number of multi-color dice is looks spectacular (and feels spectacular to the touch). But then other players can recall their colored dice from you.

Beyond looking good, Discoveries offers opportunities to feel good, too. Setting yourself up to complete a route is fairly painstaking. Each "clear an obstacle" card requires at least two placements - boots and/or hooves, which stay on the board, and the journal symbol, which is placed last and lets you advance. If one journal action (for, say, a river) is not sufficient to complete a route (which may go river-then-mountain), then you need to complete both the mountain and the river at the same time - so you'd need to set up a dice spot for a river, then a dice spot for a mountain, then place two journal dice to bypass that card.

As you acquire Indian cards, your ability to traverse terrain more efficiently should improve, which is satisfying. Since it requires multiple steps to complete any difficult card, it's always satisfying. But even more satisfying is setting up the "super-move" - there is a marketplace of three route cards at any given time, and when you complete a route you take a new one from the marketplace. However, if you're ambitious enough, you can lay out your board such that when you complete your own route, you also place enough dice to complete one of the routes shown on the marketplace. If you do that, you complete the extra route and get an extra turn. For there to be such a splashy move in such a cut-and-dry eurogame... the high is pretty great!

While it's think-y and action economy is tight, Discoveries's pace is excellent because each turn you're either picking up dice or, more commonly, placing just one type of dice. Given that any given route completion will take more than one type of die, many placements are trivially quick, so even with four players, you rarely have to wait more than 1-2 minutes for your turn to come by - super-routes excepted, of course.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness