The journey continues!

We are having so much fun with Darwin’s Journey! It met our expectations and I just feel like playing it over and over. 😁 The rules of play aren’t too complicated, but on any turn you have a plethora of possible actions to take - so many hard decisions! 🙀

You play for 5 rounds, each consisting of placing every worker one at a time, then there is an upkeep and rewards phase. Action spots are grouped into “diaries” 📖: If there is already a worker on a diary, you have to pay coins to use the diary’s action ☝️ - money can be tight so this can strongly influence your decisions. During the game additional slots can be unlocked. There are 4 main actions:

🧭 With Explore you can move an explorer on an island, gaining the reward of the space where you land. Meeples block spaces and can leapfrog each other. One of the most important things is gathering specimens - you can later deliver these to the museum for money and points.

⛵ Navigate allows you to move your ship. It’s similar to exploring but there is less going on on the sea track. You do want to keep up with the HMS Beagle to not get penalties for end of round objectives - and more importantly you can place out explorers on new islands if you reach them.

✉️ Correspondence has you placing stamps on one of 3 spaces. At the end of the round whoever has stamp-majority gets the depicted rewards. Removing complete stacks of stamps from your player board also rewards you with bonus actions.

📜 In the Academy you can buy wax seals to upgrade workers. Actions have seal requirements, so not every worker can do any action! Having a 4th or 6th seal also earns your worker a distinction, making their actions stronger. Then you have crew cards too with seal requirements that you are trying to match to activate the card’s effect!

This is only the tip of the iceberg of course. 🙂 There are other smaller yet important actions too like grabbing objectives 📷 that you can put on a slot of your player board upon completion, or placing down tents on campsites ⛺ - both triggering bonus effects.

Actions and decisions are interlocked in a really fun way! You always have both long-term and short-term goals that keep you engaged. 😊