Explore the lands of Navoria

You might have seen a glimpse or two of 🧭 Explorers of Navoria, an upcoming game from Dranda Games that is currently on Kickstarter. The artwork by Meng Chunlin is a joy to look at with its cutesy illustrations and pastel colors, 😍 but you might be wondering what the gameplay is like. We’re here to shed some light upon that!

Explorers of Navoria is a lightweight tableau-building game. In summary, you play over 3 rounds, trying to synergistically pick cards and actions to maximize the points you gain!
A round is made up of 4 phases, but the most important are Recruit and Gather. Recruiting involves drawing tokens from a bag and choosing from these tokens to determine which type of card you can take from the display; then during Gathering you will use these same tokens to then do actions in the city.

There are 5 types of cards you can collect for your tableau:
🧭 Adventurers allow you to move on the 3 exploration tracks. You get extra points at the end of the round if you are in the lead on these.
🍏 Artisans give you resources that you have to allocate between your 3 ports. Each port has a different set collection requirement. Whenever one is filled, you activate its bonuses and discard the resources.
🔨 Builders build outposts on the exploration tracks. These act as checkpoints, from where your explorers will start the next round, plus they also improve the port bonuses.
⚔️ Soldiers score for built outposts at the end of the game.
💰 Merchants give you point income for specific species. All cards belong to 1 of 4 species, and there is also a racing aspect to gather 5 icons of each species to earn the favor of them for even more end game bonuses.

💬 To have the most points at the end you really have to cleverly combine things: move on tracks where you can also score for the majority. Build outposts for which you have soldier cards, and try to trigger those ports with resources more often. Favor tiles for species also score for specific card colors, so you might want to specialize accordingly.
The game is easy to pick up, but there are a bunch of aspects to watch out for as you play! 🙂