Episode 244: Darwin’s Journey

Darwin’s Journey is a worker placement game in which players will follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin recounting his memories of his exploration of the Galapagos Island. It is a 1-4 player game that can incorporate numerous other variations to enhance game play, we will just be covering the base rules here.

The game lasts five rounds, in which players will be putting their workers on different locations across the board to do so many things. Most of the actions that can be performed are bound to requirements that your workers can learn by attending the Academy where they will acquire wax seals of different colors. The more complex the action, the more difficult the necessary requirements will be. When placing workers on action spaces some spaces allow for multiple workers. If a worker is already in an action area, additional workers must pay either 3 coins or 2 coins based on player count. Money is very tight in this game.

Let’s talk about the base actions. You will be exploring the Galapagos by advancing with your explorers in one of the different islands. Everyone starts on the first island and each subsequent island becomes unlocked as you progress your ship through navigation. On the island you will collect new species, placing tents and gaining bonuses. When you advance your ship by Navigation you are racing to complete each turn’s objectives if you are caught up with Darwin’s ship the Beagle you will score and if not you could suffer a point deduction. Advancing your ship will also give you access to the new islands to explore.

After you’ve gained species through exploration and navigation you can deliver them to the museum. Doing so will earn you money and evolution notes in the form of books by taking into account both the column and the row where the specimen is placed. This action of the board is crucial to amass many end game scoring points.

By performing a correspondence action, players will be able to place their own stamps in one of the envelopes. Moreover, by emptying one of the stamp columns of the player board, players will be able to immediately obtain bonuses that will allow them to create action chains during the game. Correspondence changes in each game, where rewards will go to the first and second player that hold the majority, during end of round bonuses. These rewards can go from coins, to discounted wax seals or advancement towards the islands.

In addition there are special actions in which players can unlock them by placing their personal lenses so that in the future when other players use that action the owner of the lens will gain a coin and during set up the special action tiles are random so each game is different. There are crew cards and personal objectives that you are attempting to unlock throughout game play by meeting their specific requirements, once achieved the crew gives one time special actions and the personal objectives give end game scoring points and persistent abilities. With the abundance of actions and long term objectives there are numerous scoring abilities throughout the game. After five rounds players will score points from their player boards and the theory of evolution track, whomever has the most points wins.