The Lost Expedition is a hand-management, card-driven co-op game by Osprey Games. Up to five players can play across varying difficulty levels. Together, you’ll place hazardous ‘event’ cards in an order that hopefully benefits your team of explorers through the jungle, and at least one of them will survive to make it to the hallowed El Dorado!
Designer Peer Sylvester became fascinated with cartographer-slash-explorer Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fawcett’s ambitious – albeit ill-fated – trip into the Brazilian rainforest to find the lost city of ‘Z’, circa 1925. Tragically, Fawcett and his team of fellow adventurers disappeared and we’ll never know if they did locate that hidden jungle city.
Hand-management lies at the heart of The Lost Expedition. All players work together to make it through the jungle to reach ‘Z’ before the deck is exhausted, or your explorers fall foul of the Amazon’s brutal conditions. Players have a hand of event cards that they must play one at a time into a public, shared timeline of sorts.
Rounds are split into Day and Night. During the Day phase, player take turns to add a card to the public ‘path’. Each card has a number, and cards have to be aligned (and tackled) in numerical order. During the Night phase, players do not have to obey the numerical order; instead, the cards are placed in a row chronologically and tackled as such. Once all of the players have added the designated number of cards to the timeline, you, as the intrepid explorers, then have to face and overcome the hazards before you.
Each card has a different hazard on it of some variety, such as encountering a crocodile, a rockslide or a native tribe. In order to overcome a card, you’ll have to complete the optional tasks attached to it, such as, say, either spending a bullet token to shoot the crocodile to earn food tokens, losing two health tokens to gain jungle knowledge, or spending knowledge to move forward a space in the jungle. Sometimes you can (or have to) do multiple tasks per card. If you fail, there’s a price to pay – usually health points.
The fantastic thing about The Lost Expedition is that you cannot directly state what you have in your hand, but you can drop hints as to what order you should all try and play cards. You can, of course, all see the public ‘path’ in which you’re going to tackle events, and what resources you have left. You can try to work out what might be the best card to play. However, the (perhaps unappealing) cards you decide not to play during the Day phase will be the only ones you’re left with for the forthcoming Night phase, so it’s all about trying to manage the perils, keeping your head above water!
The artwork by Garen Ewing on the cards is fabulous. It’s like something straight out of Hergé’s Tintin comics – wonderful colours and strong lines, certainly homage to that familiar ligne claire style. The Lost Expedition is a tough co-op, but an adventure you and your friends will want to go on time and time again. There’s also a solo mode, and a team-vs-team variant, too.
Player Count: 1-5
Time: 30-50 Minutes
Age: 14+
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