Fantasy Flight Games – Scouting Ahead In This Discover: Lands Unknown Gameplay Preview
Discover: Lands Unknown is an experimental new game of survival and exploration with a twist–every copy of the game is unique. Though the core mechanics are the same, each game is its own experience. Here’s just a taste of what you can expect within.
We’ve featured Discover: Lands Unknown here on BoLS before. It’s an experimental new Unique game from Fantasy Flight Games. These are games that, like Keyforge, have their own unique components. Each box is powered by the same basic game engine, but within each copy of Discover: Lands Unknown, you’ll find a unique set of characters, enemies, locations. In one game you might wake up as a survivor on a mountain, in another, on a desert somewhere. The name of the game is survival (well it’s Discover: Lands Unknown, but you know what I mean), it’s you vs. the elements. Can you survive? Can you discover lands–presumably ones that are unknown? Probably. But if you want to have these unknown lands be a little more familiar, here’s a gameplay preview for you.
Each game of Discover: Lands Unknown begins with players waking up in a harsh wilderness location without any idea of how they arrived. You’ll set your team up according to one of five different starting scenarios (which one you get depends on the box), which will set you up on your way towards survival.
These starting scenarios have a number of “quest cards” which give you mysterious goals. These can be things like revealing landmarks, as seen above, all of which you’ll need to do if you want to advance through the stages of the game and try and escape the wilderness. But along the way you’ll have to explore your environment and gather resources if you want to have any chance of surviving the deadly nights of Discover: Lands Unknown.
Gameplay happens in two different phases, The Light of Day and the Dark of Night, and the two are as different as…well, you know. During the day you’ll explore you’re surroundings, moving from hex to hex on the board, revealing unexplored hexes before trying to move into them to gather vital resources or to find a safe route through the woods.
All the while you’ll have to be careful not to run out of Stamina before making it back to the safety of your campfire. Running out of Stamina ends the daylight phase, and if you’re not near a campfire when Night falls–it’s going to be bad news for you.
Nightfall is a collective event, which replenishes stamina for the survivors–but which also inflicts you with statuses/events that you’ll have to counter with the resources gathered earlier in the day. Hunger seems straightforward, but there are other threats. Any survivor not at a campfire draws a threat card, as you can see–these are wild beasts and other dangers lurking in the wilderness. If you can keep your wits about you, you can survive.
Each game comes with two different biomes, and threats both “dynamic and connected.” All of this makes me want to go out and dig into a really fun sandbox game, and this seems to offer everything you’d want for that. You can pre-order it now, so you might want to get, while the getting’s good.
Discover: Lands Unknown – $59.95
You awaken with a splitting headache and no idea of how you got here. The wilderness stretches in every direction, and something howls in the distance. Your quest for answers will have to wait; first, you need to survive. Will you help the others that are stranded here or will you save yourself at any cost?
When two to four players find themselves marooned in the harsh wilderness, you must cooperate and compete to search for water, food, and tools that will be essential to your very survival. But your adventure holds many secrets. Every copy of Discover: Lands Unknown is unlike any other in the world. A mix of environments, storylines, characters, locations, items, and enemies have been engineered to tell a story unique to every copy of the game thanks to an algorithm that ensures no two copies are alike. Your copy will contain various tiles, cards, and tokens, each pulled from a shared pool of components, and the combination will be different from every other copy in the world.
What do you think of this “Unique” style of bundling?
