Jeremy’s Gaming Gratons: DARWIN’S JOURNEY with OCEANIA

Board Game Gumbo is pleased to present another game night recap with Jeremy Dobler. This time, Jeremy gives us his first impression of the Oceania expansion from Darwin’s Journey, one of the Acadiana Board Gamers most beloved and most played euro games of the last couple of years.

Here is Jeremy with his initial impressions:

Finally got a play of Darwin’s Journey with Oceania in. I really love the new Hazard mechanism. It gives that feeling of discovering something new and dangerous as you move through the Oceania islands.

Being the first to explore the rivers or islands can net you hazard tokens, and subsequently steps on the Hazard track, which have a consequence at the end of the account multiplied by the number of times you’ve stepped down this track.

Such as losing specimen tokens, money, or goal tiles. If you can’t lose those, you lose VP in their place. The consolation prize is that being the ‘most’ hazardous gains you the consequence tile that has a single use ability, but if you don’t use it by end of game it’s worth a VP.

They opted to use a spider token to track negative VP gained in this way, so as not to work against those goal tiles that require X amount of VP to achieve during the game.

You just reconcile at the end, losing as many points as your spider token moved up.

To complement the new board, there’s a changed player board. Gone are the discounts for placing in the same space as another player, or when performing the academy action.

There’s balances to that, with the new Silver and Gold Village tiles that, like tent spaces, the Silver allow you to pay an amount of money to place a tent and gain a new powerful once or twice per game ability, and the Gold usually have a new end game scoring condition. One of the guys got 18 points from this Gold Village tiles.

We played with a few of the modules as well, like the fragmented letters, which mixes and matches the 1st and 2nd place spots in the Correspondence area. The combination on ours was especially nasty, with an antidote and 2 money being in the 1st slot, and then the last slot was gain 2 money and everyone ELSE gets a hazard step.

I really enjoyed the chaos that came from that.

There’s also new ‘once per round abilities’ that your completed crew cards can have, making for some incredibly strong combos by tapping those cards.

And a new marketplace style side board for the additional action tiles, wherein you have a great choice about what comes out, but it may cost extra.

Nothing had a terribly complex rules overhead, but the Hazard and new board were arguably the most game changing. It’s very akin to the time penalty in the Firelands expansion, but different enough to warrant also owning if you’re a fan.

Jeremy is an omni-gamer from Lafayette, Louisiana, who games at home with his wife and young son, but also can be frequently hosting or visiting game nights with friends all over Acadiana. Jeremy loves games about nature, IP games involving turtles and batmen, and games appropriate to play with his young son, but expect lots of different games discussed here each time.  All photos courtesy of Jeremy Dobler.