Familie spellen

Explorers of Navoria

Summary

đź‘Ą A game for 2 to 4 players
⏳ Play time is 40 – 80 minutes
🏢 Publisher is Dranda Games

Introduction

Welcome to Navoria, a land where strange new continents have emerged from the sea. What needs to be done is to explore these new continents. So it’s time to gather beside yourself some brave adventurers and get out to find a way through these new continents.

Setting up the game

Place the mainboard in the play area.

All goods, like weapons, food, and minerals, are within reach of each player.

Place the action tokens into the bag.

Prepare the townfolk cards, separate them by color, and place the piles on their indicated spots on the mainboard. Then take 3 cards for each color and place them face up beside their decks.

Now shuffle the favor tiles and draw 4, which can be placed in the indicated area on the mainboard.

Each player will take a player board and related components.

Place the trading posts on the indicated spots on the player board.

Then, place one exploration token on each exploration track.

Place your VP token on the “0” spot on the main board and the favor markers beside your player board.

Randomly choose who will start and place the turn order marker on “1”.

Everyone is ready to start exploring these new continents of Navoria!

Let’s get in on the table

A game of Explorers of Navoria will be played in 3 rounds, and each round has the following phases:

1. Recruit: Either take action tokens from the bag and place one in the town center and one on the corresponding card deck. The other option in this phase is to take an action token from the town center and place it on the corresponding card deck. After one of these actions, the player can take one of the three cards that are available in that color and place it in their player area. Depending on the type of card, it can be executed immediately.

2. Gather: Starting with the last player, take a token from one of the decks and place it on a matching available space in the Town. Proceed until all tokens are placed in the Town spots, and this phase ends.

Of course, each Town spot has its own ability, and the sooner it’s occupied, the bigger the benefits.

3. Income: Gain VP for the position a player has reached on each of the exploration tracks. The player who is furthest on a track will achieve the most VP, and so on. Besides this, each player will receive extra VP related to the income cards they have in their play area.

4. Return: Clean up phase and start returning the exploration markers of each player on each track to their nearest outpost. If no outposts are reached, place them back at the beginning of that track. Then, all action tokens need to go back into the bag. Discard the remaining recruit cards beside the main board, renew them, and place three new cards of each color face up.

A phase will end, depending on the player count, when a certain number of cards have been picked. Each player will have the same amount picked and placed into their play area.

Getting back to the cards, which you can pick. They are colored and categorized as follows:

– Blue: Merchant cards, which provide immediate VP and extra VP each Income phase.

– Yellow: Build cards, when taken, allow a player to immediately place an outpost on the indicated track and earn some VP.

– Red: Soldier cards, which will be active during the final counting.

– Purple: Adventurer cards, which can give VP during the Income phase and move your exploration marker on the indicated track. It is interesting to move along the tracks as far as possible each round because all tracks allow players to earn nice VP when they reach the end of a track.

Besides all the individual card abilities, all cards also have Species Icons. When a player collects a total of five of the same icon, they can claim the Favour of that species. However, there are only two favours to win per species. So if you’re the first, you’ll get the most VP by the end of the game.

Also, a nice way to earn VP is to gather goods like weapons, food, and minerals. Each time you gather goods, they need to be placed on your player board. On the player board, there are three areas which are related to the exploration tracks on the main board. When achieving the required goods, they can be traded, and players will receive VP and execute extra actions. Each time another outpost is placed, the achievements will increase, related to each area.

So, after the 3rd round ends, the final scoring takes place. This will include the final scoring cards and the favors players have achieved. Never guess who will be the winner… Yes, the player with the most VP will be the best explorer and can call themselves the winner!

Conclusie & eindscore

Difficulty: 2.25/ 5
Re-playability: 7
Our score: 7.5 out of 10 dice

During our meeting at Spiel 2024, we received a nice explanation about the game from William Brasher of Dranda Games. What a great person! We are already looking forward to future games and can’t wait to see him again at Spiel 2025!

The Explorers of Navoria is already looking overwhelming and really colorful. However, when we started to play the game, the great quality of the components and the nicely used colors were indeed a joy to experience.

Each player has some nice parts that are sometimes related to Root. But for us, there was no problem.

The player boards are good enough; although a bit more double-layered would keep the outposts even better in their spots.

The game mechanics itself are very easy to get into. After reading the rules, the gameplay speaks for itself. A nice touch in the game is how to store the goods. You can’t place them in the same area, and only one per catch.

Although it looks like a lot of different cards, after a few plays, you’ve seen them all. This could lead to less interesting replayability. That does not mean it’s still not a pleasure to play this game. What it will mean is that the great feeling will change quickly if you prefer more variety in gameplay.

We also played with the expansion “Forgotten Lands,” which introduces some nice changes, an extra player, and a solo mode. However, these changes do not provide the extra bite that keeps it interesting for a very long time. Explorers of Navoria is a nice game to start the evening when you are with some new board game fans. It gives everybody a good feeling and ensures a lovely evening of exploration.

We want to thank Dranda Games for this review copy and the opportunity to write about this game

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