Darwin's Journey (+Fireland Expansion)

On the Origin of Special.

Darwin's Journey
Designer: Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani
Publisher: Thundergryph Games
2023

How to Play:

A splendid worker placement game published by Thundergryph Games and co-designed by Nestore Mangone and Simone Luciani (Newton), Darwin’s Journey sees players recalling "…Charles Darwin's memories of his adventure through the Galapagos islands, which contributed to the development of his theory of evolution.”

Start your game by grabbing a few variable starting 'contract' cards and objective tiles which may more than likely steer how you want to strategically approach each game. You'll have four workers, each with a coloured ‘seal’ next to it. Place those workers out on the main board to:

• Sail along the bottom of the board, keeping up with ‘HMS Beagle’ which moves forward at the start of each of the five rounds of the game. Grab lots of bonuses as you sail as well as dropping off ‘explorers’ on any new islands that your ship might reach.

• Move those explorers around the islands. Once again, lots of bonuses along the way as well as a range of animals to discover. Hopefully you will reach those animals before your opponent?!

• Place any animals that you have discovered in a museum – gaining coins for your troubles and moving up a ‘Theory of Evolution’ track which scores you a chunk of points at the end of the game.

• Gain new coloured seals to place on your player board next to a specific worker of your choice. Perhaps a worker might have various coloured seals which would allow it to take a range of different actions. Perhaps though you might make that worker specialise in a specific colour to make it more and more powerful in a specific area? Choices, choices, choices…

• Create new and more powerful worker placement spots to visit on future turns – gaining a coin if another player visits that space you created. Kerching!

• A ‘correspondence’ letter writing action - a nice bit of area majority tussling which will give you variable bonuses at the end of each round.

Power up your workers, power up your worker placement spots, sail, explore, discover – and most of all brace yourself to be gaining bonuses and triggering combos at every turn. Some nice contract fulfilment type objective tiles to try and achieve throughout the game too - with any contracts fulfilled being plugged into your player board and triggering ongoing abilities.

You’ll pick up Victory Points through your general business during the game but the bulk of the game winning points will come from:

• Working towards end of round strategic goals e.g. “3 VP for each green seal you have” – but be careful as you will also lose points if your ship is lagging behind the HMS Beagle which sails ever onwards each round. The further away HMS Beagle has sailed, the greater your penalty.

• That aforementioned ‘Theory of Evolution track’ – multiply your progress on the track against the number of completed rows of discovered animals in the museum.

Fireland expansion:

Purchased separately or included as standard within the Collector’s Edition of the game, the Fireland expansion is a new main board which offers:

• More places to sail to and more islands to explore. Some nice choices now on which paths to take and which bonuses to chase rather than perhaps the more linear (but enjoyable) paths found in the base game.

• Adventures to discover along the seas or on the islands. If you are familiar with the ‘Encounter’ cards in either Scythe or Lost Ruins of Arnak’s (wonderful) Missing Expedition expansion then you will be in familiar territory here. Draw a card, decide which bonus to take…you get the idea.

• Think carefully which of those bonuses to take though as each will see you having to stay on the right side of a new ‘time track’. The more ‘time’ you use on Adventures the more ongoing penalties you will face (e.g. things cost more, movement is more restrictive etc.) Perhaps though you might find ways to get ‘time’ back elsewhere on the main board? licks lips

Solo Headlines:

Broadly speaking I very much enjoyed what was on offer in the solo mode, albeit with a couple of very minor caveats.

Your solo opponent ‘Alfred’ takes one of four unique solo boards (printed on the back of the normal player boards) each offering a different level of difficulty. Alfred also has a small deck of cards, each displaying three possible actions. He tries to take the first action, if he can’t he tries the second and so on…

Those actions are generally quite close how your own turns play out so during your game Alfred’s turns are reasonably intuitive and quick enough to take. That said, you should anticipate that much like your own turns, Alfred is also going to see some combo-bursting action and there might be some occasions where you are needing to do four or five ‘things’ for him during his turn. These things aren’t requiring you to work through flowcharts - it’s more a case of just being prepared occasionally to have to do a little bit more than ‘move a meeple from A to B’. If you have played Paladins of the West Kingdom solo then you will know what I mean here – those times where your opponent has lots of workers left but your round is finished so you have to spend time just quickly doing its (straightforward enough) moves. Actually, as I mention Paladins, it’s worth probably comparing the solo mode here to other Garphill games: a decent amount of up front figuring out how the solo bot works but then once you have internalised its quirks and nuances then the actual playing is pretty quick and seamless.

The rulebook makes this ‘up front’ figuring out a little harder than it needs to be – particularly when explaining how Alfred should place out his workers, or how it gains ‘seals’ throughout the game. Once both of these things ‘click’ then they feel intuitive and fully understood – but getting to that point felt like a bit of an uphill struggle and I think the examples in the rulebook could have been a little clearer on both points (as well as one or two ambiguities when adding in the Fireland expansion which led me to the eternally helpful forums on BoardGameGeek). It makes the solo mode feel more complex than it actually is… when what it actually is, is a very straightforward experience!

One other small gripe is that while there are four different difficulty levels which should provide a decent challenge for even the very best players, each of these difficulties has its own built in strategic focus. For example the ‘Easy’ mode will play a heavy ‘Correspondence’ game, the medium difficulty will play a heavy ‘Exploration’ game etc. It’s great that there are differing strategies that it chases but I think I would have preferred it more if those differing strategies weren’t restricted by which difficulty level I was playing with. It would have been amazing to be able to play any difficulty level and see the strategy of the bot randomly change to keep me on my toes – I’m thinking of something along the lines of the excellent solo mode in the Great Western Trail series and regardless of what difficulty level faced in those games, the solo opponent starts with a random strategic focus.

All of that might make you think that I didn’t particularly enjoy this solo mode or think that it was very good. Let me clarify:

This is a very enjoyable solo mode and I think it is very good.

Alfred made for very engaging, realistic and enjoyable opponent. Definitely one for those that like playing against a more intelligent solo opponent but without too much hard work once you have internalised its up front ruleset. Solo game plays in 75minutes give or take. Not the worst set up in the world but certainly not a ‘quick to the table’ game either. Enjoyed this one a lot, once the initial hurdle was cleared.

General Headlines:

The first thing to say here is that Darwin’s Journey largely resolves the main / only complaint that I had with Newton, the previous title from this design duo: the extremely abstract theme and functional but underwhelming artwork. Here the main board pops and the artwork feels both classic and modern all at once. Things thematically feel less abstract than they did in Newton – particular the sailing, exploring and museum areas. You really do at times get that sense of exploration and discovery and excitement - as much I suppose as is possible in a Euro game.

It's abundantly clear that Darwin’s Journey has been deliberately designed to reward players at every possible moment. Lift something off your player board = Bonus. Place something on the board = Bonus. Move something…anything = Bonus. Just glance at a tile and think about it momentarily = Bonus, Bonus, Bonus. It’s a game that wants to give you as much as possible as often as possible. Sure there are some of the usual worker placement restrictions e.g. – pay a cost to place a worker if someone else is already there, and a few other ‘damn, I was hoping to get that thing first’ moments but other than that this game is rewarding you for EVERYTHING. Combos are aplenty - to the point that it can be easy to get delightfully lost in your own turn. What this also does is make you feel like you have played a full, involved and rewarding game. The playtime on this one doesn’t at all outstay its welcome but by the end of the game you have done so many turns, actions and combos that you feel wiped out. Darwin’s Journey isn’t a “lets immediately reset and go again” experience – it’s a satisfying “I might have a quick lie down after that”. Which is great as that is exactly what I like in a game!

I guess there is only so much innovation that can be done with a worker placement mechanism, but Darwin’s Journey certainly makes a good attempt at doing something quirky – assigning coloured ‘seals’ to individual workers and limiting which spaces that those specific workers can visit. But the game also gives you the excellent option of powering up your workers with new seals as you see fit – either making them extremely powerful in one particular specialism (e.g. “I’m going to keep putting green seals next to this worker so that they become superb at exploration”) or equally making them multi-coloured so that they can do a ‘little bit of everything’. It makes for some interesting decisions – particularly as you also have the option of not only upgrading your own workers but also upgrading the spaces that they can visit if they are powerful (colourful?) enough. Having to lose 3 coins each time you visit an area that already contains a worker is also a delicious part of the puzzle – desperately wanting to keep hold of those precious coins but equally desperate to visit the space that someone else already occupies. Those that don’t like worker placement games aren’t going to have a damascene conversion here – but those that do like worker placements are in for a real treat.

While you can certainly push specific strategies in Darwin’s Journey – for example in one game you might choose to go 'heavy' on exploration and during the next game you might go heavy on trying to gain seals to power up your workers etc. – the game demands that you do at least a little bit of everything and I really appreciated that juggling / balancing act. In particular I thought the push and pull between your personal ship sailing along the bottom of the board and the HMS Beagle which moves forward at the end of each round was brilliant. I really like having strategic objectives to try and work towards and seeing HMS Beagle move forward each round at the bottom of the board and reveal ‘this round your optional strategic objective is XYorZ’ was great of itself. But to know that even if I smashed that objective out of the park, I would be penalised if my ship was lagging behind HMS Beagle was a really tense pleasure. Here I am trying to do everything else on the main board but feeling forced to also make sure that my boat kept sailing forward to 'keep up'. So enjoyable.

I didn’t particularly have any complaints at all about the game – but what was unusual was that I didn’t reach 10+ straight plays of it. This is rare for me when I find a game that I like as much as Darwin’s Journey - finding myself leaving it on the table for weeks, plumbing its depths over 10 – 15+ repeated plays. Ok, I guess I wasn’t far off with eight straight plays. I’m not trying to say here that I was ‘done’ after those plays and had seen everything that needed to be seen. Far from it actually. What I suspect tired me out more quickly than usual was the sheer volume of wonderful things that were happening at any given time each and every game. You are getting bang for your buck here on every playthrough and I guess that in those first eight plays of Darwin’s Journey I got the same amount of ‘game’ as I might with 15+ playthroughs of a different, lesser game. Everything here just fizzes with stuff do, things to juggle, places and spaces to explore.

Fireland Expansion:

I suppose a key question for people might be “should I get the Fireland Expansion and is the base game a lesser experience without it”. The short answer to that question is that the base game is brilliant and perfectly satisfactory. If I had no idea that the Fireland expansion existed then I would be more than happy to play with plain old vanilla Darwin's Journey. But I have played with Fireland expansion and once seen it can’t be unseen. I can’t see myself playing without it again. It’s not a big clunky add on. It’s not something that changes things profoundly. It’s 90% the same experience – just with a different map which is a lot less linear, some fun ‘adventure / encounters’ to uncover along the way and a little more weight added to the overall game by having to manage ‘time penalties’ that you might accrue. If you are able to find a Collector’s Edition of the game then I do think it’s worth picking up a copy as there are other modules and goodies that come along for the ride with the base game / expansion out of the box. Otherwise, grab a copy of the retail base game, see if you like it and if you do then dive right into the Fireland expansion which in my opinion lifts this game from ‘very, very good’ to ‘excellent.’

At a Glance:

With or without its Fireland expansion, Darwin’s Journey is a seriously enjoyable worker placement game full of exploration, bonuses, combos, discovery and fun. It’s an incredibly classy game, with good artwork, mechanisms that intertwine splendidly, a good blend of overarching strategic goals and more opportunistic tactical play. More than a good game on its own, if you are able to get your hands on the Fireland expansion then it is highly recommended - lifting the available options and overall weight into my personal mid-heavy sweet spot. Either way, I’m looking forward to journeying with Darwin again at some point soon.

Final Score

• Darwin’s Journey: 8 out of 10

• Darwin’s Journey + Fireland Expansion: 9 out 10

Reviewed after 8 plays. *Please note that the images in this review show the Collector’s Edition of the game: dual layered player boards and a smattering of wooden and rubber components instead of the usual cardboard found in the retail edition.