{"id":11130,"date":"2026-02-18T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11130"},"modified":"2026-02-17T20:46:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-18T01:46:47","slug":"darwins-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/18\/darwins-journey\/","title":{"rendered":"Darwin’s Journey."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Darwin\u2019s Journey is one of the greatest complex board games I\u2019ve ever played \u2013 although I\u2019d call it more medium-heavy than heavy \u2013 with its incredible balance of various mechanics, strategies, and even a little player interaction. It first came out in 2023 and has since soared into the top 100 overall on BoardGameGeek, a list that skews towards heavier games, while also jumping on to my own top 100<\/a> at #16 this November, the highest new entry of any game this time around. I\u2019ve owned the game for probably two years, having picked it up on Prime Day in either 2023 or 2024 for half off, and also love the fact that the box is half the width of any other game of its playing weight I own. (It\u2019s out of stock right now at Miniature Market<\/a>, but Noble Knight has some used copies<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Designed by Simone Luciani*, who has three games on my top 100 (Grand Austria Hotel is #17, Tzolk\u2019in is #57), and Nestor Mangone (Masters of Renaissance, last year\u2019s Stupor Mundi), Darwin\u2019s Journey is a worker placement game at heart, asking players to place their four crew members on various action spaces to move their ship, place and move explorers on three mini-maps, gain \u2018seals\u2019 to give those crew members more abilities, place stamps for ongoing rewards at the end of each round, deliver specimens to the museum or research ones already there, and more. There are countless opportunities to chain your actions as the game progresses, and you can even add a fifth crew member if you complete a gold-level objective. There are also objectives for each round, plus end-game objectives, with two (one gold and one silver) given to each player at the start, then more available as the game goes along. You also have to make sure you have enough cash on hand, because taking actions nearly always costs at least one coin. There\u2019s a lot going on here, to be sure, although I think the turns are so simple \u2013 and your options become more limited within each round as you have fewer workers left to place \u2013 that the game play isn\u2019t that complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rounds are marked by the progress of the HMS Beagle, and that\u2019s one of the few places in this game where the actual history of Darwin\u2019s voyage intersects with the mechanics. (It\u2019s still better at that than the acclaimed In the Footsteps of Darwin, a much inferior game to this one in every way.) You lose points if any round ends with your personal ship behind the Beagle\u2019s position, after which it moves forward to the next marker on its path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a round, each player will place one worker per turn, based in part on the seals (skills) that worker has. You start the game with four workers, one with a wild seal, and then three others with seals you\u2019ll choose in a crew-card draft before the game. The seals represent ship movement (blue), explorer movement (green), stamps (yellow), and more seals (red). When the game begins, there\u2019s one available space for each color of seal, and each of those spaces holds an unlimited number of workers. Once there\u2019s one worker anywhere on the blue\/green spaces or the red\/yellow spaces, however, placing another one there will cost 2 coins (or 3 in a two-player game). Players can unlock further, more powerful action spaces under each of those four by paying the unlocking cost to place a \u2018lens\u2019 on those spaces, making them available to all players \u2013 although anyone else has to pay you a coin to use yours. There are six special action spaces that change each game, two of which are available at the start while four are locked. You can also go to the museum to submit or research specimens, go get another objective tile and gain some coins, or go move up in the turn order and gain some coins. If everything\u2019s unlocked, which I don\u2019t think is technically possible, there would be 24 possible action spaces by the end of the game; I think the maximum is actually 22, and I\u2019ve never seen that many in an actual game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darwin\u2019s Journey also offers players all sorts of \u2026 not quite mini-games, more like side quests that carry real bonuses. You start with 12 stamps in three sets; if you send out all four of a set, you get a bonus. Explorers can place tents on certain spaces on all three maps; you get five of them, and after the first one, each subsequent one you place gets you a bonus. Each crew card you drafted at the beginning has a specific set of five seals shown on it; if you get all five of those seals on one worker\u2019s row, you can assign that card to that worker and get the bonus shown. Getting five seals on a worker also gets you three points at game-end; getting the sixth gets you seven points, and having at least four seals of a certain color gets you an additional benefit when you use that worker for that action. Still with me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game goes five rounds, after which you do the end scoring, adding to points you gained during the game from each round\u2019s objective and from points you picked up with your explorers. You score all of your personal objectives. Then you score the research track: every time you submit a specimen, you gain some research points and\/or coins, while you can also move up the research track via exploration and occasionally through a special action space. You count the completed rows of specimens in the 4×4 museum, add two, and multiply it by the highest number your marker has passed on the research track; it\u2019s the weirdest part of the scoring by far, but the point gains here can be substantial, easily a quarter or more of your total. I\u2019ve seen winning scores over 200 points, and I have won a game with only about 155 or so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m worried I\u2019m not selling this game enough: It\u2019s fantastic, easily one of the best complex games I\u2019ve ever played, behind only Great Western Trail on my top 100, one spot ahead of Grand Austria Hotel and four spots ahead of Agricola. GWT is a little more accessible, I think, but it has a small deckbuilding element, which is one of my least favorite mechanics. Darwin\u2019s Journey is more forbidding, and getting all of the parts to work together in your head is a real challenge \u2013 and even after many plays, I\u2019m still not great at it, because my preferred strategies may not work as well with the specific actions and maps and other facets specific to that game\u2019s board. If you pulled both games out and asked me which one I\u2019d want to play, I\u2019d have a hard time choosing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* I actually haven\u2019t played Luciani\u2019s highest-rated game, Barrage, which I\u2019ve heard is amazing and quite brutal in its interactive elements. I hated Rats of Wistar \u2013 literally got up mid-game at a First Look demo at PAXU and left, although part of that was one of the other players was insufferable \u2013 and I would say I like but don\u2019t love Lorenzo il Maginifico, preferring the card-game version. He also co-designed a new version of Railway Boom with Hisashi Hayashi, who won the Spiel des Jahres last year for Bomb Busters and designed the excellent Yokohama games. As always, forza azzurri!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Darwin\u2019s Journey is one of the greatest complex board games I\u2019ve ever played \u2013 although I\u2019d call it more medium-heavy than heavy \u2013 with its incredible balance of various mechanics, strategies, and even a little player interaction. It first came out in 2023 and has since soared into the top 100 overall on BoardGameGeek, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,462,161],"class_list":["post-11130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boardgames","tag-complex-games","tag-highly-recommended","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11132,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11130\/revisions\/11132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}