Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7884208/corps-of-discovery-a-game-set-in-the-world-of-mani

Designers: Jay Cormier, Sen-Foong Lim
Publisher: Off the Page Games
Artist: Matthew Roberts

Corps of Discovery is a clever and unique deduction game for one to four players, but I’ve only experienced it solo thus far. That said, I’ve played the base game over twenty times, and two of the expansions as well, so I’ve gotten to know the game pretty well. You can also glean that I enjoy this game considering I’ve played it 30-35+ times.

In Corps of Discovery, you explore maps to try to find resources necessary for both survival and to complete certain challenges and missions. That sounds pretty straightforward in theory, but you have to use deduction rules to try to map out the best path. For example, one standard rule is that there is only one wood per row and one per column, and wood is always adjacent to at least one water. There are many terrain types with different stipulations, but hopefully that gives you an idea. You certainly can’t just go around exploring willy nilly, otherwise you will definitely fail and/or die.

The base game comes with twenty different maps – ten flora and ten fauna. Not only are the maps of each type unique, but there are also different resources that can show up with their own deduction rules, and the goals and methods for success vary between the flora and fauna scenarios. Even though the base game play stays consistent, the two are quite unique and provide variety and good replayability, and each individual map is different, regardless of what type it is. That said, I wouldn’t say you could replay maps back-to-back because you’ll know where the terrain types are, but you could come back weeks, months, years later and have no remembrance (unless you’re Sheldon Cooper).

The solo game plays excellently. It’s very simple to just play solo and figure out the puzzle yourself vs. with others. The game also encourages solo players to take more items at the start of the game which is definitely helpful.

Besides the wonderful solo implementation, this game also boasts a great play time in my opinion (30-40 minutes per solo game once I knew how to play). The artwork is also incredible, the componentry is nice, and, most importantly, the design and mechanics are very clever and well executed. The puzzle is really interesting as you have to leverage the deduction element and then successfully manage your resources and complete challenges, which can be quite difficult. It’s a balancing act between using resources for challenges and using them for survival.

In addition to the good variety in terms of the flora and fauna and the number of maps in general, there are also different characters to experiment with, items to try, varying threat cards, and numerous challenge cards to continually make it fun and thinky after many plays. While I’m on the topic of the challenge cards, I do want to point out one other design choice I particularly enjoy: the challenge cards have a time frame in which they need to be completed, and the way this is measured is by exploration tokens. For example, one card could last three exploration tokens, and another two. This adds nice time-related tension to the game that I very much enjoy and appreciate.

Although this is a very solid game, I do have a few qualms. The first is that even if you’ve done as much deduction as possible based on the given information, there is still luck involved and it is still possible that you don’t get the resources you need and/or were expecting. I also don’t care for the rule book. The training missions are useful, but I feel like there is some random edge case style information missing, and more importantly, the layout is unintuitive and less than helpful when you need to look something up that’s not a major rule of the game. I will also say that the exploration tokens used on the map can be quite fiddly, but I genuinely can’t imagine how else they’d pull off what they do, so I can’t be too annoyed by it.

Overall, Corps of Discovery is an innovative and original deduction game that is very difficult to beat but also very fun. You get lots of content for the price in just the base game, but you can also add expansions as well if desired. I’d highly recommend this one to anyone who likes deduction style games but wants a more intense and puzzly experience. Not only do you have to keep up with the exploration and resources, but there are also the challenge cards, limited spaces to hold resources, and you always have to keep yourself alive with food and water. It’s not easy, and I definitely house-ruled some things and still lost many times, but I had a great time, and that’s what matters! 😅