Charting familiar territory

Explorers is a flip&write game that has been on our shelf for a while. As we didn’t feel like playing anything big, it was the perfect opportunity to try it out. It has a vague theme about finding this untouched land of levitating rocks that have been hidden for centuries, and now it’s your task to chart the terrain. 🕵️ It’s fast playing (well, as most flip & writes) with easy rules but variable scoring conditions.

To start out you take 8 map tiles and randomly place 4 of them into your player board to make a random map - each other player copies this same layout, then you are ready to play! 👍 The backsides of unused map parts could be used as additional scoring goals with the advanced rules.

Each turn the active player will flip a tile from a stack that depicts 2 terrain types. 🧐 He chooses one of the types, and then crosses out 3 orthogonally adjacent squares matching that terrain type - other players either go with the unchosen terrain type and cross out 3 squares as well, or copy the active player’s choice and only get to cross out 2 squares.

As you play you will expand outwards, collecting more and more things. Each round lasts for 7 turns, with the active player always changing between turns. You can collect:
🍎 Provisions (apples, fish and carrots) that have a set-collection aspect - you ideally want to collect complete sets to score the most points at the end of a round
💎 Gems each score a point, so you just want to find as many as possible, as soon as possible, to score them over multiple rounds.
🗝️ There are Keys you can gather, so you can visit Temples 🛕(players claiming them first score more points)
🐎 Horses allow you to put another X on any adjacent space
🗺️ Maps allow you to cross out 4 squares on a terrain of your choice, instead of choosing from the drawn tile.
🏘️ Finally, you want to surround villages from as many sides as possible, to score the most points.

💬 In summary, Explorers is a perfectly fine flip&write, and it is fun to play. I just don’t feel like it brings anything that we haven’t seen before. So if you don’t have many such games it could be a nice one, but I think we just have too many similar titles already.