Welcome to Meeple to Meeple uniting players around the
world, a 30 minute exploration of PJ and Gareth's four-game
experiences from across both sides of the Atlantic.
Each episode, they share their thoughts and opinions on the
World of War games, including their favorite themes, games,
hot topics, and much, much more. Hey, guys, and welcome to
episode 66, Darwin's Journey by Thunder Grift Games.
That's what we're going to talk about today, as always.
I'm PJ. And I'm Gareth.
How are you Sir? I've got a Husky voice again.
Remember the episode last year that you know people loved the
Husky Gareth while he's back? I think there were some memes of
like a Husky with your face, yeah.
Put it Yep, he's back. Husky Gareth is back, folks.
Surrounded by people you might we did miss.
We missed an episode last week. We didn't miss an episode.
We didn't record an episode because I was away for the
weekends and then got stuck in that storm coming home.
And I was. Holed up inside.
An ice storm, yeah. And then I was three days away,
so you missed. Everyone's been ill for weeks
and I thought, I'm doing well here, I've avoided it and then
midweek and I've got a sore throat, but hopefully I'll just
go away. It can do one, but we're here
and we're going to have Darwin's journey, which?
Was we? Had a lot of games of last year.
One of my personal games last year and you got this game for.
Christmas So we had a long journey this past week and we
thought it would be appropriate to talk about Darwin's journey.
Yeah, top game. So if anyone doesn't know about
Darwin's journey, it was released.
I think it was a it was a Kickstarter.
It took a while to get. Yeah, yeah.
Can I please? Can I?
Can I please tell? Can I read the description?
I love you. You read the description.
I want to read the description of this game because this is
amazing. So for those of you who aren't
familiar, Darwin's Journey is a worker placement game where
players recall Charles Darwin's memories and his adventures to
the Galapagos Islands. Here's my favorite part right
here. This is what I want to read
because I think this is what makes this game shine.
I know we're going to talk about it with an innovative worker
progression system. Each worker studies the
disciplines required to perform many actions in the game, such
as island exploration, ocean navigation, and correspondence
I. Love it.
It is a delightful working placement game every action and
you start with four workers. You can lock a fifth one.
You can. Can go to certain spaces
depending on their specialism, which is depicted by seals.
These lovely little rubbery seals in the deluxe version.
Cardboard in. The cardboard in our in our
version. The standard version.
There are green, green, blue, yellow, red and then the purple
is wild. Wild and I guess blue is sailing
ships. Yes, green is adventuring across
the islands. Yes, yellow.
Is correspondence. And then Red is getting more
seals. Yeah, it's like adding the seals
to your workers and that's the innovative worker progression
system. Yeah, you add those seals to
make your workers more diverse or stronger so they can take
better actions from those four. It honestly, every time I play
it, I just have such a fun, engaging game throughout from
the moment. I mean, the board is so the
board is double sided in a deluxe is a standard version.
If you hit it over, you've got the Fire lens map.
Is that same. So it's double sided for one to
three players and then the other side is for four plus, right?
Yes, I'm looking at the for four players.
So you have a one to three player side, flip it over, it's
a four player side and then the expansion has an overlay that
you fit over the base game, right.
It's really interesting. That's it.
Yeah, that's incredible. I do feel that the full size of
the expansion for Our lands is the full game that feels like
the absolute perfection and the standard game.
I mean it's still still good enough in terms of decision
making that when you put a worker down if you're first in
that kind of book. Yeah, there's like free to go.
There's three journals, 2 pages each.
So each page is one of the actions, right?
And if you're the first one, you're free.
Otherwise, you have to pay a $3 penalty if someone else has gone
there, including one of your workers.
Yeah, it's expensive. Well, I love those.
There's there's that journal where you've got kind of, yeah,
the unique 6 actions for that game, there's quite a few to to
randomly choose. You can use a pre predefined set
and then you go there and that's again that's based on the number
of seals. Right.
The combination maybe 2 greens and two Blues, but when you open
that location up you get that free action that really can help
get some big old combos. Yes, yes.
I think the I think there's, I mean it's 3.85 out of five, so
it's quite a heavy medium heavyweight.
No, really, it really is. You've got to manage your your
money very closely. Yeah, it really did.
And you've got, there's so many ways, there's so many ways to
score points in this game, right.
I just finished playing it before this recording.
Katie and I. And I kind of I was handicapped
at the very beginning of the game because as I told you, the
colors, the only colors I had access to was blue and green.
So I could take the sale action and the exploration action
couldn't take correspondence. I had no way to get more seals
to progress my workers. And so I was terrified in round
one. And I'm like, OK, so I've got to
be really careful and I ended up a lot of sale actions.
And yeah, I managed to, as long as I stayed ahead of the Beagle,
right? Because the Beagle is kind of a
all the Beagle really is is a is a round, a round.
Market, it's a round market, but it's pushing you to explore
otherwise you get negative points.
I mean you can. You can even mitigate that you
can. So at the end of each round
there will be a a scoring based on the position of the Beagle.
Do do you have this many seals? Do you have this many icons on
your player board? Whatever it is, you get this
many points and then the Beagle advances to the next position
and then just I I've never done this before.
I stayed ahead of it, yeah, the entire game, which I usually
don't do, but I had a lot of blue seals, so I was taking the
sale action. It does take.
Yeah. Some of the stress away if you
can keep ahead because yes, unless you've mitigated it where
you can, you can cap the Max number point you lose.
But the other, the other problem with the fires, the Fire Land
expansion, is the the movement of time.
Oh yeah, which is negative point.
And then you start the game with like -10 points.
So you have to you have to sail and explore and cross the
ribbons where there's a little token which then lets you draw
the corresponding card. And they're both really good.
But time passes, and the further time passes, the more negative
points you have at the end of the game, unless you mitigate
that later on. All about, well, it's all about
mitigation. Every.
Yeah. So whether you're you're saying
the seas with the Beagle, which again you can take a slightly
longer path sometimes to get some nice rewards or you can
just sound straight. Then you've got the islands
where you can explore and depending on the version, you've
either got three or four, maybe even 5 different island routes,
all of which give you the chance to find and study specimens.
Obviously when you find those, you mark them on your map and
that give you a chance to gain coins if particularly of the
first of that type. And then on the main board you
can then send those off back to London, I think it is.
And if you have missed out on certain animals and you can
study those in the museum, there's always wait.
There's always something you can do and there are spaces that
don't cost you a penalty to get maybe your own personal
objectives, but there's always something to do.
But my favorite part about the game is when you pull off like a
three action combo. So you go here and you might do
a exploration thing and that gives you two like a little
tent. You put a tent down that gives
you, that gives you a boat action, the boat action you move
and that gives you other museum study action.
Before you know it, you've got 3 or 4 combos and you've scored a
ton of points. They are the favorite parts to
pull off when you when you do that part of the game.
If you pull them off, which, let's be honest, I don't.
Oh. PJ.
Oh no, I'm not that good. I'm not that smart.
That's definitely the that's the that's the best part of Darwin's
journeys is you can pull off some incredible combos and
sometimes they just appear. I can do that and then do that,
but they could. You know, there's also the bit
of waiting for your turn because like if you haven't got the
coins and you can't go to space, who else has been to?
So first player order is really important.
I think it is. It is incredibly important,
probably more so than in any other game I've played.
Yeah, if you end up being last, you do.
You do need to bump bump yourself up, right?
Because if you're. Yeah, I've lost because I've
been lost, definitely because I've not at least had a couple
of goes to be in first place. If you're the first player in
Darwin's journey, you're guaranteed at least one action
where you won't have to pay $3. Yeah, yeah.
And that's huge, especially in a two player game, right?
Like, yeah, yeah, I think it. I mean it.
I can't imagine it in a three and four player game because
then it's going to get really tight really quickly.
Yeah, I think in four players the books are divided up
slightly more. I can't think now there's little
red dividers, isn't there? Depending on the player, count
how many of? Those, that is a good question.
Zones there are. I can see you're reaching for
the rule, but now I am. I mean, Ball Game Geek says it
plays best with three, but no one says says any negative about
the player count. It generally plays well at
recommended one player, two player and four player, best
with three and it will be probably a little bit of
downtime, but we've played four and three.
The only player count I haven't played is solo, actually.
No, neither have I. Not yet.
You're so you're right. In a four player game, there's
like a red ribbon in this in between the two spine.
Of the journal, yeah. So that it divides things up.
So it's possible. Just make it slightly.
Otherwise, yeah, you'd be hanging out.
So much coin. Yeah, So what?
What? What I also like is that the
game comes with some additional cards.
And again, I don't remember, but these are Kickstarter bits.
But you can start with some pets.
Have you got the pets? No.
So there's a there's like little pets like a let's say a cat, a
parrot typically and it you pick one of those, it allows you to
basically have a little bit of starting resource and a one off
action you can flip once in a game.
So whenever we teach it, those are added to the game.
Well, that's nice. It's nice.
We don't have that. We do have the The Crew cards.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're good.
So like if you if you achieve a a certain number of specific
colour seals to one worker, that'll unlock the crew card and
then the crew joins your ship's crew.
It basically if one of your meeples becomes that crew.
Yeah, yeah. I think it's in this game where
when you set the board up and you randomize both the actions,
those six actions which are unique and you see the rewards
at the bottom of the board for where the Beagle is right?
And you look at your drafted crew hands, it does help you set
out a really good strategy. Because if you haven't, if if
the scoring is all about, let's say, fauna or flora or species,
then you might do more adventuring.
And it's all about, I don't know, certain seals that you
might put more investment into. Those sailors, those sailors, if
you do get the right combination, which might limit
you elsewhere, they do often give some very nice one off
actions. So yeah, definitely requires
probably to play to the stuff you've been given, but then
adapt as the game goes on and you can see how the rest of the
I guess the players are starting to play.
I think if I had one criticism of the game right and then I'll
challenge you to provide one criticism as well.
So to be fair, is the design of the box so the box is too
shallow because when you put everything in it, the lid has
too much of A lift for such a shallow box.
This makes here I've got the deluxe and it's yours.
Got storage in it like storage boxes.
No. Because I was, I would say it's
one of the best storage boxes. Going not to give you an issue
about the Foamer of not having the Kickstart deluxe version
right? Well, if you.
Isn't that interesting? If you have the retail, it's
it's a thin box. What we should do is we should
take photographs for our Instagram post this week.
Yes of your box. The storage solution.
Yep. And I guess those things that if
you because it was a long Kickstarter, I think it was.
It felt like it dragged on for a long time.
Like I think it When did it go live?
Like because you you backed it on Kickstarter we bought.
It. You put it real in a store,
yeah. It definitely was a long, a long
journey, yeah. Now I'm looking through through
Kickstart trying to find it. Here we go.
So it originally launched, yes, it funded the 20th of Jan 2021.
OK. So must have been a December,
because the world is still crazy.
Yeah. Funded for just shy of just over
$1,000,000 a million euros. OK. 16,000 backers.
So how about 1 criticism? Your turn.
Do you have one criticism of the game?
There is, there are times and I feel that I've lost midway
through the game. So there are times when just
because of of that at the beginning, if you haven't
necessarily played efficiently or effectively, it's quite hard
to catch up. So it can be punishing.
Yeah, it can be punishing. And the other thing is it, it's
obviously it, it's quite a heavy game.
It is. It's not.
It's not a game you're going to get out for a family games
afternoon. Well, but it's interesting that
you say that so. Quite a few people.
Katie and I managed to. We were so before we were
getting ready to record this afternoon, Katie and I were
like, you can we play this? Because we wanted to play it
before so we could talk about it.
It was fresh and we had like an hour and 35 minutes.
So we played A2 player game of Darwin's journey from set up to
completion and had time to do chores in an hour and a half.
So, So two players, Yeah. I think 2 player works very
nicely. It really does.
Even three players would probably add maybe 20-30.
Minutes. Yeah, I think, yeah.
I think we plays the Friday with our friend Adrian and I think we
get for it pretty quick. Yeah.
Certainly for for for this year, right.
For the weight of it, right. It's not like set up 4 hours
later we finished. Yeah, it's so again, the geek,
the box says it's between an hour and two hours, and now and
then it'll be fast, I mean. I don't know that we could play
it in an in an hour, little over an hour, two players,
absolutely. So.
So it's definitely worker placement.
There's a lot of resource management, primarily your
money. It's that worker progression
system that really through the course of the seals, making your
workers more prevalent. So I have one other segment of
this conversation that I was thinking about.
I've written down three of them. If you don't have any, that's
OK. How about can you name three
games that this that Darwin's Journey is similar to?
So if someone has had hasn't played Darwin's Journey, what is
it similar to? Or if they have played Darwin's
Journey, what else would you recommend?
Yes, I I was just looking at the two designers, thinking to
myself. Yeah.
What games have they made that are similar but Darwin's
journey? You want me to go first since
I'm going? To put the other spot I was
thinking. So we were looking in our
collection and we think the Darwin's journey is really
similar in style and gameplay to Newton.
Is that who's that by? So Newton is actually by Seamon.
Yeah, same same designer. It's it's a it's Seamon.
No Seamon. Cool Mini or not?
Oh no, I'm I'm actual designer. Yeah, Yep.
Luciano. Luciano, Luciani.
Yep. It plays very similar, right?
So you know. I've not played it, so do I need
to get Newton? It would be the question.
I think you do. It's just different enough.
There's there's different, there's a travelling around
Europe track, there's a studying track, there's there's a a
technology tree where you're sending students to school in
Newton. And so it has that similar
playability but your management of resources is not as tight but
you've got to manage your actions really well.
And Newton plays well at 2:00 to 4:00, so it scales well and we
feel like Darwin's journey and and Newton are just, you know,
if you if you played Newton, Darwin's journey is a great
option. If you played Darwin's Journey,
you're looking for something similar.
Newton. I think it's probably the
closest. Every time I get on these
podcasts, I end up buying more games.
You are welcome. I was thinking through, I guess,
Simone or Simon Simon's previous games.
Simone. Luciani.
Was in terms of probably similar weights would be Tekkenu or
Basque of the Sun. Oh sure, which, which?
Well, that's dice placement. It always reminds that game's
incredibly tight and also incredibly unforgiving.
So you have to play optimally both upgrading your player board
to open up more actions. Right.
Try other games by those guys. So it's not by Simone Luciani,
but we were thinking about Lorenzo, Illinois.
Magnifico is another one, while maybe a little less lightweight.
That's by same guy. Is it same?
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that Simone? Yeah, yeah.
I was thinking the same. I'm that's a.
Really. That's a really typing?
Yep. That's his list.
Barrage, Zulkin. Grand Austria Hotel, Marco Polo.
Lorenzo Darwin's journey taltum. Have you played that?
I have not. I have.
Not ranked slightly harder than Newton and then you've got
nucleum. I must be a pretty big fan
because I own oh, but one of those games without.
Maybe we should episode just on his games.
Maybe, yeah, because I thought about Grand Austria Hotel.
But I was like, you know what? There was something else.
I was thinking about my last recommendation.
It's a little bit more recent, and that's the White Castle by
Deviere. That's another tight You've got
to be careful, You've got to manage your actions.
Brutally type I think I posted about it last night.
I think on his I. Think you did.
You did those nine nine single actions, but again, you've got a
chance to pull off some absolutely stunning.
You've got to find the combos you can actually get yourself.
12:15 you. Can you can?
Yeah, that is a good game. So highly recommended.
So I would I would recommend I think.
I think at the end of it all, if if you if you like Newton
Lorenzo the White Castle, then you're going to love Darwin's
journey. If you've played Darwin's
journey and you're looking for something new, then we would
recommend Newton Lorenzo, the White Castle.
I feel like that's. Second, Newton as well, if you
like a Newton. Well, Newton's has just been
added to the wish list. That's good.
I reckon I could pick that up second hand somewhere.
I mean, it was anyone who wants to trade it.
Oh, I tell you what happened last time.
You know you're the parrot, the parrot game.
Parrot Parrot Decimo. Last episode, The game, The
Wildlife Game. Amazon Life, Life and Amazonia,
yeah. Craig, get into games.
I know, Reserve me. What a what a legend.
If you haven't listened to his podcast, get into games.
On air. Check it out Spotify.
That's right. Do it.
It's a beautiful listen. That's a lot of fun.
He and he and Becky are just amazing and their conversations,
their conversation last week about Legacy games was just
amazing. I really they had some
constructive good. Flow and he goes out on the
Monday, so you get out on the Monday you get.
Us and then you list on Tuesday. What a week.
That's awesome. That's great.
Do you have anything else to say about Darwin's journey?
No, I just highly recommend it. If you want something heavy like
you say, add it to your collection, You will not be
disappointed. Not at all.
OK. Thanks everyone for listening.
We'll be back soon. Thanks everyone for listening.
Please subscribe and as always, we'd love to hear your thoughts
and ideas, so make sure to leave those in the comments.
And don't forget, you can also chat with us both on Instagram
at meeple to Meeple.