Renowned Explorers: International Society

You embark on 5 expeditions with the aim of earning enough renown to be regarded as the top explorer. You pick a team of 3 characters, with 1 designated leader. There’s 5 characters in 4 groups: Fighter, Scientist, Speaker, and Scout. Initially, there’s one person from each category that can only be designated as the leader, but the other characters can be chosen once you play a few campaigns with them.

Between these expeditions you can spend your “Insight” which rewards you with more resources; “Research” which can give you all kinds of bonuses; Renown on “entourage” which then gives you more from reward tokens; Coins can be spent on equipment (trinkets, armour, attack).

On each expedition, there’s a map of connected points. Moving between points consumes 1 or 2 food. Each point gives you some indication of what you can find there and what abilities may be the prerequisite.

You are given text descriptions then sometimes a choice of what to do, with the percentage chance to succeed, and rewards displayed to you. You are shown how these percentages are calculated, which is usually a baseline chance, then additional bonuses depending on what skills your characters have. You acquire “tokens” for renown, science
and coins. These tokens are converted into their respective rewards based on your bonuses from your Treasures and Entourage.

When an encounter happens, your characters and enemies are placed on a hex-based grid. The combat has some interesting ideas. Your team and your opponents have a mood: aggressive, friendly or devious, and it’s basically a rock-paper-scissors mechanic. The combination of your opponent’s mood and yours gives some buff or debuff. Performing that style attack can change the mood and you are shown how many “points” you need to change the mood which can vary between 1 and 5. You get 1 point for performing an attack and 3 points for killing an enemy with that attack. This also affects your overall approach and each fight can have different rewards for approaching the fight in certain moods.

Each of your characters has at least 1 attack for each, the aggressive attack is physical, but the devious and friendly attacks are Speech attacks. Each character has an Attack and Speech rating, as well as Armour and Speech Defence.

There’s plenty of buffs and debuffs which have a large impact on the battles. Understanding these and exploiting them is key.

If a character is defeated, then you lose Resolve, and if you lose all Resolve, then it is Game Over. Resolve can also be lost on events, but you can also gain from events. You get 2 Resolve when you start the next Expedition.

Characters gain experience and can level up which gives them a choice of 2 traits, a new attack, and sometimes a new trinket slot.

In some ways, it is quite complex but doesn’t take that long to get a general idea of how to play. The game encourages repeated playthroughs to try new characters, and character combinations. You can also play with the aim of beating your previous scores.

There’s a few difficulty modes to choose from, so you can play with permadeath where losing forces you to start again. Or you can play with unlimited retries and have multiple save files to go back to.

The game has a lot of elements that are based on the random number generator. If you like this style of game, then it is a well made game, with plenty of replay value.

Turn-based strategy game (with a hint of RPG) about launching choose-your-own-adventure style expeditions: interesting gameplay and good flavour even if the game would benefit from even more content...there's plenty of options in some things (e.g. characters) but limited selection on others plenty of room on the map for even more locations): hopefully future DLC adds more content.

Still, despite it having potential to be even better, it is entertaining and fun as it is, a turn-based strategy game that is suited for more casual playstyle.