Discover: Lands Unknown Review - What Just Happened

early in the year Fantasy Flight Games announced key for a groundbreaking new way of approaching a trading card game designed by Richard Garfield a man whose humble list of design credits includes Magic the Gathering netrunner and others as soon as I saw the announcement I knew that this could actually rival Magic the unshaken King monolith of DSG's if not in numbers then at least its spirit because embraced exactly what the others refused to do no longer do you have to build your deck or obsess over the meta or hunt down expensive cards instead you just buy a deck and it's yours and it's one-of-a-kind and unique and no other deck like that it exists in this world that's brilliant I think that's exactly what trading card games needed it sheds elitism and embraces ownership and ownership is such an important part of this very physical hobby and I can see key forged communities being so much nicer places then magics had ever been a game that went up its own but by at the root of the pro scene but if that wasn't enough Fantasy Flight Games then announced that this was not the only unique game and that second one unlike key fudge was a board game a board game where each box is once again unique an adventure that only you will experience and if you bought a second copy it is entirely likely that your adventure will be different it is a concept that is invigorating ly innovative stupendously astounding lavishly luscious brazenly beautiful captivating ly capricious magnificently meticulous and meticulously magnificent courageously creative drop-dead dastardly different stupefyingly staggeringly salaciously surreptitiously splendid gobsmacking ly and bummed spanking ly gorgeous blow salia kiss and accidently call her Vivian bodacious it's fresh it's feisty it's dripping ly dazzling and spicy it's all about exploring and not at all about things that are boring like stevedoring or carpet flooring it's zesty it's cool it's as the kids say on fleece and it is right here on our table and know why it's no good I can hear some of you saying I knew it sweet sugar alternative I knew it procedurally generates boardgame box with a narrative how is that ever going to be good strangely and this is ultimately the reason why we decided to cover discover lands unknown is that the unique nature is not all this game's downfall and now that we have you hooked we can tango back a bit give you a broader vision if you will each box of discover lands unknown we'll take you on a wilderness survival adventure upon fantasy flights insistence we will try and spoil very little including showing you only one of six possible terrain types provided to us separately in this demonstration kit for visual purposes hence the flimsy cardboard for clarification our review is based on an actual copy of the game plus an additional play with an entirely separate copy and initially things look good you'll set up your map based on a scenario read some story to get you in the mood for a sexy exploration and your head off on your adventure each player will receive a choice of two beautifully illustrated characters and I cannot overemphasize enough what a fantastic job has been done here not only is the roster diverse with playable characters from many conceivable backgrounds but the art direction is superb adding a touch of whimsy and bringing these people to life making you feel a connection with them I wanted to take these people on an adventure because I wanted to find out what happened to them I wanted them to succeed fortunately taking them on that adventure is a simple matter each player gets a carp or dial to track your stamina and wounds when your turn comes around you'll start on a campfire and you can spend stamina to do things want to go somewhere that's one stamina wonder moves through dense forest that's to stamina immediate you will notice that most of the map is unexplored so you'll trot off to the edge of a tile spend one stamina and flip it through you little tip can we leave I suppose me yep no believe it or not Luton is the perfect analogy because all we find here is some rocks perhaps a dying fish and an old ruin but that's okay because we can make the best out of this situation collected resources can be used to craft items and crafting in this game is lovely each player is given a card to craft which could be a weapon giving you coveted rerolls and fights or perhaps something more esoteric like a fish trap but no matter what you get it's going to be useful somehow even if it's not immediately clear one in fact if you haven't played the game before it is not obvious what the item actually does until you make it leaving it as a nice surprise once you do make the item however the schematics go into a shared pool and now everyone can make their thing this is so nice because it actually incentivizes you to help other players by giving them resources actually it works the same in real life I had crafted this lovely Cup al-bakr ball canyon and now you can too why would I want to make that because you can have a lovely cup of milk and milk comes from cows talking of cows this resource that we just picked up turned out to be a cow now if you were to ask us what is NPI's official stance on animals we'd be pleased to tell you that we love them very much and a generally very fond of them but if you were to ask us what NPI's official stance on cows is then we would be obligated to tell you that we find them morally reprehensible and won't give two thoughts about turning them into a steak fortunately according to the rules of the game you are now forced to kill it like everything fighting in this game is straightforward each opponent has a gray value and a red value every time you fight you'll roll both the red and the gray dice roll equal or above the gray and you deal them a wound roll below the red value and you'll take a wound and wounds are bad because any four will eliminate you from the game once you're out of stamina or just decide that enough is enough you'll your turn and once every plane has had a go one player will draw a night card and apply its effects to everyone this is also how you get stamina and if you haven't spent all your stamina you can save up for a big next turn you're also likely to need food or water or both and if you don't have them you will take a wound and remember four wounds and you die you're out of the game but just you not everyone else there you get to carry on playing while you go off and make a cup of tea or maybe manage the evening Spotify playlist totally being young and hip and pretending you know who cardi B Jepsen is one of my favorite roles in this game is that if you are near another player who is fighting you can assist them it doesn't cost you anything to help you just pitch one of your free combat cards but the disadvantage is that if they get injured for example you could get injured too in that way assisting becomes an interesting proposition because you want other players to succeed but there is a real sense of risk if you do sadly that's the only thing that's interesting about combat because not only is it obviously simplistic and too reliant on luck but it's also tedious let's say I scored a hit against that cow great however it's not dead because it needs free wounds can I keep fighting it no because in its infinite idiocy the cow will just wander off in a random direction forcing you to persistently and laborious leave follow it in vain attempts to try and hit a slow-moving object that is three times the size of you it's not the sort of bad design that I mind because thus begins the multiple round spanning epic story of my bovine hunting foibles and that's funny but I'm telling you right now that's just about the funniest thing that happens in this game and remember these characters these heavenly creatures whose fate lies in your hands nothing nothing is as disappointing as when their story goes nowhere yeah a sushi chef doesn't have to cook meat for it to be edible and that makes sense until you kill a chicken and then that Salmonella any way you slice it and so that doesn't make sense but the real problem is that the story is as thin and as fishy as a sad whisper each scenario starts with a story card that won't tell you how you got here but at least will tell you what you need to do to get out this might be investigating a certain location gathering a bunch of a resource etc once you do a new plot card will be revealed and some have particularly nasty surprises this way you'll get through to or at most four before you reach a conclusion our game was a particularly contrived affair with certain heavy riffing on an 80s cult movie was it the eggheads starring dan Aykroyd no okay was it sixteen Candles you were there playing it with me right no yeah it was with now and I each time you investigate a numbered location something exciting will happen although mark my words excitement is not guaranteed you'll draw the appropriately numbered card from the exploration deck reveal it and then you'll either get a new item or perhaps advance the plot or maybe I'll say something like if you only have the thing that would think the thing then you could think the thing the board game equivalent of you are not ready yet come back later and once you have found the key that unlocks the door the hatchet that chops down the hatch you will be allowed to instead of looking at that same numbered card to dig down a few cards deeper upon which secrets will be revealed I think this is discover lands unknown at its most interesting you have objectives you have mysterious locations to explore but also there's a story objective to advance but also this food to gather and water to find because you need those every mine and then this monsters to find and there's a lot of distance between all of them and you have to move back and forth and you'll be aching over which one to do first because you need to advance the plot because if you don't advance the plot then you'll die but you also need food and if you don't get food you'll also done and last time I heard dying is a bit puh but I have to admit that it all feels slightly artificial the interesting part of the game is definitely the investigation but at times we've got the distinct impression that all that survival malarkey is just there to pat it out I never felt rewarded when I killed an ostrich I was just glad that I was done with part of the game and then could move on to something else and at other times it felt arbitrary one of the major unspoken objectives in most scenarios is finding water this often may be a single reliable source of it on the map and you could play a game where the distance between it and a focal point of the scenario spends multiple turns getting across or you could play the same scenario again and because of the semi random distribution of tiles it could end up right next to it because water is so important it is entirely likely that in this scenario one of you will be designated the water meal and then you'll be lugging water back and forth across the map and wouldn't that be fun to do for about an hour not to mention that it could have made the scenario so difficult that you likely lost anyway we have to admit that we've deceived you just a little bit no we don't think it's the unique nature of the game that makes it a very mediocre experience but it does have some hiccups which certainly don't help each scenario will tell you which story cards to use except our copy was missing about five of them and we were certain they were missing because we were told to use cards one to sixty with some cards in between potentially not being present but the cards we were missing were 56 to 60 and surely if they'd meant to do this if this was on purpose we would have been told to put in cards one to fifty-five instead and sure enough as we played the game we were told to look at cards 57 58 and of course we couldn't and with this being unique we weren't even sure if we could file a missing parts request making out copy just a bit Duff but that's just a sticking point and the real crap kernel is that this game is semi cooperative as genre often disliked because mostly it doesn't work but instead of telling you why ourselves in a unique twist for NPI and with kind permission from mr. vassal we are including a clip from the dice towers review of discover lands unknown trust us there is a point to all of this but the biggest part of this game that I did not like was at the end of scenario 1 so this is a bit of a spoiler but I don't care so then a scenario warned you to do something I won't explain exactly what was going on I'll try to be as nebulous as possible but you had to beat a boss right okay fine so we're playing our first game so Sam went up and he's fighting this boss and I'm like all right I'll help you so I come in and I play cards to help him and he he wins he was a fierce battle but he wins okay fierce by a few lucky rolls of the dice he wins great you know what happens Sam wins the game me and the other players still have to win the game on her own that guy did he beat came back to life we had to fight him again or else we lose and only Sam wins wait a minute why did I bother even helping him what kind of weird sadistic trick is this even Sam wasn't satisfied with that outcome because from now on we're never gonna help each other that I I'm still mind-boggled that that even existed in this game as you might have guessed the exact same thing happened to us almost verbatim except that it happened in scenario 3 instead of one and our reaction was identical no one round the table wanted to play anymore we quit in unison and the reason I'm bringing this up is because now I'm not even sure about the unique nature of this game if two reviewers just happened to have the same story imagine playing through this getting another copy and the story being just the same imagine how disappointing that would be even when it's not so annoying that it makes you want to quit the semi car part is suspect and that's really the sad part because I get what they were going for some narrative driven games want to tell story via text on cards where's others what the story emerged via mechanisms and the situation's they create discover lands known wants to have its cherry pie and eat it but then on top it wants to experiment with funky ingredients like sauerkraut actually hang on just a second all right should be ready by now this could be actually something really good because there's a layer of cherries here but also as you can see a layer of sauerkraut and if this takes off I mean I'm not joking I could be a millionaire so best of luck yeah I think I'm gonna go back to ballgame reviews I think the idea is that if each player is forced to play for themselves but the game is so hard then they can't actually win unless they cooperate then inevitably Frost's them into uncomfortable situations for example my friend Herbert here could win the game but he'll die if he don't get some food now I have that food and I can bring it over to him but I am inclined to go in the opposite direction and get some water for myself because I am dying of thirst and this is a classic Sophie's Choice I could go and get him the food and help the others win the game but then lay myself would lose because according to the rules only the people alive at the end are winners oh you could go and get the water wait for Herbert to dilute his corpse and then try and survive and win on your own and that might sound like an interesting decision but I'm telling you right now it's not what the game is effectively asking you is do you want to be an ode to your friends and the answer on our table was always no because we started playing this game cooperatively from the get-go because that's what it initially wanted us to do so I'll be frank with you I don't think I'd actually want to play this game with people on whose table the answer would be different because this game is hard work and after about 90 minutes of that hard work dying doesn't feel great especially when it's because of your friends and I can hear somebody saying but wait a minute I love semi cooperative games what about dead of winter what about balusters Galactica what about new Angelis maybe even and I'll tell you what stick with them because those games work so much better talking of similar games obvious parallels will be drawn between this and seventh continent which we've covered separately but if you need a catch up it's kind of like discovered that drawn out over 30 our experience with the highs being much higher and the lows being equally as dull in hindsight 7th continent is a better game but still not one we would recommend if you've never watched one of our videos before and you've got this far know that we are nearly never this negative and it doesn't feel great picking this game apart especially knowing how much hard work went into it by talented artists or by designers whose name appears in the credits of our second most favorite game no one set out to make discover lands unknown a bad experience the opposite it's brave and it tries and it succeeds in being different and I sincerely hope that the elements that did work like the art or the simple but robust system carry over into wherever they take this next and experimenting is great and it's important but not when it's such a flop and there is no reason why you should pay for this flop with your wallet [Music] no still not good

Channel: No Pun Included

Views: 52,187

Keywords: no pun included, board game, review, discover, lands unknown, ffg, fantasy flight games, npi, video

Id: lmYHoyazLHA

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 20 2018