Phil Walker-Harding’s games are very consistently among my favorites for light to midweight games that you can play with the whole family. Gizmos, Sushi Go, Cacao, Silver & Gold, Super Mega Lucky Box, Imhotep and Imhotep: The Duel, Gingerbread House, Bärenpark … he’s got few peers in his space, and he’s had very few misses in his fifteen-year career as a designer. Explorers ($25 at amazon via that link) came out in the U.S. last spring – I saw it at Gen Con – and it’s another flip and write that I’d say is part of an unofficial trilogy of games along with Silver & Gold (polyominos) and Super Mega Lucky Box (numbers).
In Explorers, players will mark off squares on their maps based on the terrain shown on the tile flipped on each turn, trying to expand from the starting square to mark off specific squares that show rewards. There’s no benefit to marking off blank squares unless they’re adjacent to one of the villages on the map; otherwise, everything you do is in service of moving towards reward spaces.
The terrain tiles have two different terrains on them, with four total on your maps – water, desert, plains, and mountains. When a terrain tile is flipped, the active player picks one of the two terrains shown and then may mark off three squares on their map that match the chosen terrain. The squares must all be adjacent to existing X’s (marked spaces), but don’t have to be adjacent to each other. Then, other players may either mark two squares of that same terrain, or mark three squares of the other terrain. There are also a couple of terrain tiles that show split terrains – so water/mountain or plains/desert – but they work the same way.
In the basic game, you score points in four ways. If you cross off a key, you can then cross off any temple and score for it, with the points for each temple declining every time a player reaches it, from 12 for the first player to 6 for the last in a four-player game. After each of the four rounds, you score one point for each gem you’ve crossed off – so a gem you cross off in the first round will be worth four points by game-end. In each round, you can score 2, 5, or 10 points for your provisions crossed off in that round – an apple, a carrot, and a fish. You can only cross off one of each in a round. And you score points for how many squares you’ve crossed off adjacent to your four villages – 3, 5, 7, or 10 points for 1, 2, 3, or 4 squares.
There are other squares that give bonuses beyond points. If you cross off a horse, you may cross off any square on your map that’s adjacent to one you’ve already X’d, regardless of terrain. If you cross off a scroll, you circle one on your board. On a later turn, you may then mark that off to ignore the terrain tile and choose any terrain you like, even one on the tile, but now you can cross off four squares rather than two or three.
The game allows you to change the maps and scoring tiles every time out, but all players use the same map and tiles in any specific game. All four of the basic scoring tiles are reversible to an advanced side; for example, the advanced provisions scoring won’t let you cross off any in round one, then gives you points only for apples in round two, carrots in round three, and fish in round four. It also allows you to use up to three expert scoring tiles that function like public objectives in other games – scoring 10 points if you mark at least one square in every desert section, or scoring points for touching all four edges of the map, with the bonus declining each round until you get it.
The game is also easy to play solo, like most roll-and-write or flip-and-write games, although I’d say this is even easier than most: You just flip a terrain tile and choose the one closest to you as the active (3-square) terrain. After each round, you cross off the highest bonus for each temple you haven’t reached yet. That’s it.
If you like Silver & Gold and/or Super Mega Lucky Box, then you’ll probably like Explorers – they all have a common DNA, right down to the way you build the flip deck (here you shuffle all eight terrain tiles at the start of each round, remove one at random, and then flip the other seven). All three games have bonuses that you can achieve through the game, although this has less chaining than SMLB or games like the Clever series from Wolfgang Warsch. This game is very much on my wavelength for a fun filler, and it comes in a smaller box, although it’s quite heavy thanks to the thicker cardboard tiles and frames for your boards. I’d rank it bottom among those three games, but not by much, and I’d say it’s a tiny bit more complex to learn and play well than either of its predecessors. It’s certainly another hit from Walker-Harding, who’s maybe had one real miss among all of his games that I’ve played (Cloud City), and definitely worthy of a family game night.