Adventurous – Sail Past the Edges

Take yourself back to a time before GPS navigation, before the globe was mapped, before longitude and latitude could be known with accuracy. The open ocean was both marvelous and terrifying: you never knew exactly where you were, or what you might find. Sailing out of sight of land was only for the most desperate – and the most adventurous.

Adventurous is a solo or cooperative game for up to four players by Dustin Dobson and Milan Zivkovic. This 18-card wallet game is published by Button Shy Games (of course) and takes 15-20 minutes to play.

How to Play

Adventurous has a Ship card and 17 double-sided cards that serve as Marvels and Maps. To begin, choose five Marvels (a combination of level I, II, and III depending on your desired difficulty), and shuffle them together.

Set one below the Ship as the active Marvel, with the rest Marvel-up as a Marvel deck. Then set aside the other twelve cards, Marvel-side down, to be your Map deck.

On each turn, you may either Explore or Discover. After that, pass the Map deck to the next player (when playing cooperatively). Continue taking turns until no more cards can be placed.

Explore

To Explore, draw two cards from the Map deck. For each card, you may choose to draw the top card (which you can see) or the bottom card of the deck.

Then place both of these cards to extend the path of the Ship. These cards can be placed in any orientation, but each one must cover the last waypoint (star) and must form a single, continuous path from the ship that goes through every Map card.

Discover

If you use your turn to Discover, do not draw Map cards. Instead, place a Marvel – either the active Marvel (below the Ship card) or the top card from the Marvel deck.

Marvels must be placed in landscape orientation (so you can read the words). They must cover the map symbols specified on their bottom right (but may cover extra symbols, unless otherwise specified). They must not cover any part of the path. Once a Marvel is placed, it cannot be covered in any way.

After placing the active Marvel (not off the deck), move the top Marvel from the deck to become the new active Marvel.

Additional Restrictions

In addition to the difficulty of the Marvels chosen at the beginning of the game, you’ll also need to decide whether to use Journey effects. These are listed on one side of the Ship card, and add another temporary placement restriction, depending on the level of the active Marvel.

And there’s one more thing to consider! Three of the four symbols on the Map cards have a threshold value. If too many of the given symbol are showing in the final map, you’ll earn zero points for that symbol.

Scoring

Once no more turns can be taken (all cards have been placed), the game ends.

Score 1 point for each visible path segment (not waypoint stars).
Score 2 points for each fin, tentacle, and trident symbol – as long as you didn’t exceed their thresholds.
Get 5 more points if you placed all five Marvels.

Subtract 5 points for each unplaced Marvel.
Subtract 3 points for each whirlpool symbol that is visible.

If you can score more than 40 points, you have made a successful voyage and won the game. Get over 50 points for a “Marvelous Adventure!”

Impressions

Adventurous is an overlapping card puzzle, much like Button Shy’s well-known Sprawlopolis. (And also like Grove, Squire for Hire, or Codex Naturalis, which we’ve reviewed.) This style of game is a great fit for a small deck. Different requirements in each game mean that even though you’ll see the same cards, they’ll feel different because of how you’ll want to use them, and how to place the Marvels each time.

Obviously the level III Marvels are the hardest to accomplish, but I was surprised at how even the level II Marvels could make for very interesting challenges. Most of them require many symbols, so you’ll need to place the map cards carefully to group everything needed in a small enough space to cover.

In every play, you must balance lengthening the path (the easiest way to score points) with areas for Marvels, while also covering just the right number of symbols. Or more precisely, leaving just enough symbols uncovered to get maximum points for each kind.

Easy to Start

Sometimes Button Shy games are challenging to learn: either because of non-intuitive constraints imposed by using so few cards, or because it’s hard to fit helpful examples onto the tiny rules pamphlet. That’s not the case here. The rules for Adventurous feel complete, and include examples of what you can and can’t do in placing the cards.

It’s also fast to set up. And once you have chosen and shuffled your Marvels, none of the cards change. You place the paths, you place the Marvels. This simplicity keeps the game fairly easy to understand, even when the journey to maximize your score is twisty and challenging.

Voyage of Discovery

There is a certain aspect to this game that really does feel like exploring the unknown. Fachri Maulana’s art for the Marvels evokes ancient seafaring legends like the Argonauts or the Odyssey. Your final map of the voyage, sprawling across the table, gives a sense of movement and accomplishment.

The puzzle involved to place each Marvel is the one part that doesn’t quite fit the aura of discovery. You already know exactly which Marvels you’ll “find” in the deck, just not exactly how they’ll fit on your adventure. But the way they work keeps each game fresh, and I appreciate the variety.

If you’d like to set out on your own 15-minute mini-adventure, you can pick up Adventurous on the Button Shy Games website.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Adventurous from Button Shy Games for this review.