Bored? Game! – Lewis and Clark

Not a game about Superman and his relationship with a plucky reporter, as I initially thought, rather this game puts you in the rugged boots of pioneers Lewis Meriwether and William Clark as they set out to explore the Western portion of the United States. In a slight deviation from history, each player controls a competing corps of discovery (as the expedition was named) in what is essentially a race to the finish. The Mississippi represents the route to be taken, beginning in St Louis and snaking across the board in place of the usual score track (and my god, is it good to see a game without a VP (victory point) track for a change!).

This is a game with some fascinating interlocking mechanics. First up is the deckbuilding portion of the game. Each player begins with a functionally identical set of six cards, but can draft more recruits into their hand from a deck of 54 characters, all of whom are, rather impressively, based on real historical figures. Like most deck builders, this allows you to push your deck into a number of different directions; but there’s a twist here, since Lewis and Clark is a deck builder without a deck. Every character you buy will go directly into your hand, and since this contributes to how quickly you move down the river, you have to be very careful who you chose to recruit.

But there’s more, despite being a race game and a deck builder, the designers have found room to also install a worker placement mechanic, which allows you place Indian meeples in various spots to take actions, thus releasing them from your expedition. At any point you can use your interpreter card to call a powwow in the village to recruit all the Indians present to your corp. This represents the expedition trading and acquiring help from the Indian populace, who at that point in time weren’t totally hostile to the colonists. Like everything else in this game, timing is essential. You might well want to take a village action, but it means giving up Indians and your opponents potentially recruiting them. Interestingly this worker placement portion of the game can become more or less utilised based on the number of players and their strategies, meaning that it doesn’t always feel as integrated as it should.

On your turn you either take a village action (as described) or play one of these characters you’ve acquired and then power it up by spending other cards (each of which has a strength between one and three) or by spending Indian meeples (each of which has a strength of one). This allows you use the card as many times as it was powered, which potentially means you can acquire shed loads of resources (wood, furs, food and equipment). In any other game stockpiling in this way would be great, but in Lewis and Clark there’s another twist in the fact that you have encumbrance.

This is the way encampment works: certain cards allow you to move your scout forward, and when you chose to set camp (allowing you, vitally, to take back your cards), you’ll move up the river to your scout’s location. If only it were that easy! Sure, your scout may have made it all the way down the river, but he’ll be dragged backwards one space for each time wasted, which is based on the amount of cards and resources left unplayed. Thus your flotilla of canoes inch forward, weighed down to the waterline by piles of equipment and people all clinging on for dear life, whilst your opponent, who elected not to take those 15 pelts he probably wasn’t going to be able to use, cruises by in the equivalent of a speed boat. It’s also entirely possible (and this is an advanced strategy that is sure to garner you the enmity of your peers) to hang out at St Louis and prepare, then jump to the finish line in three well planned turns.

Lewis and Clark offers a lot of meat to get your teeth around, and it’s admirable how much it messes with and integrates the deck building and worker placement genres. However, its originality is both a boon and a curse. Players will find they have to get out of ingrained habits of stockpiling, taking only what they absolutely need to make progress. Some will see this as a beautiful twist on the acquisition fervour most games inspire, perhaps even going so far as to see a critique of consumerism going on under the surface, whilst others will be massively frustrated by the need for frugality and calculating future needs. Fundamentally, it’s really hard to make all the interlocking cogs of this game click in your head, which makes for an unexpectedly heavy weight gaming experience. If you’re looking for a game that’s a challenging puzzle to be solved, in which every single choice is vital to your success, then Lewis and Clark will not disappoint and it’s this aspect, I think, that makes it a wonderful thematic implementation – pioneering expeditions, after all, are far from easy.

Designer: Cédrick Chaboussit
Publisher: Asmodee
Core Mechanic: Deck building, worker placement, race
Number of Players: 1-5
Play time: 2+ hours
Complexity: Heavy