Expedition: Northwest Passage Board Game Review

Year Published: 2010

Players: 1-4

Playing Time: 60 Minutes

Expedition: Northwest Passage aims to be an exploration game, as you might infer from its title. To accomplish this, it has you laying tiles that act as your discoveries, which lead you slowly toward the titular passage.

Along the way, you’ll be identifying (i.e. collecting) points of interest. Discover a strait. Talk to some Inuits. Chart an island. All of them grant you points, with bonuses in some cases for having the most at game’s end. It’s also a race of sorts to the Northwest Passage, for a diminishing number of points after someone gets there first. But finding the passage at all is optional, as there are enough ways to score points elsewhere that you may be able to get by without actually discovering it, provided you make good use of your time elsewhere.

This is all done via action points, which you can split between your primary ship and your snow sled, and which you can “overclock” at times. Spending additional points to take extra actions in a round is undeniably inefficient, but in short bursts, it may help you net a crucial discovery before the player alongside you.

You’re exploring on a shared board, so you can also fritter your life away in a corner or mix it up with others, utilizing their tile placements and jostling for position on the journey. Portions of the board also freeze over at times – simulating the onset of the cold season – which either forces you southward, or demands that you take to your snow sled for a number of rounds, while your ship sits frozen in the water.

Exploration as Theme

The historical details provide a backdrop, but it’s the idea of exploration that lies at the heart of the game. That, and the tension of the race between players. And for clarity, it’s not always a race to the passage. It’s a race for any resources on the board. You might spy a particularly juicy tile that will complete a massive island, allowing you to take credit for charting the whole thing.

But you have to draft the tile, maneuver your ship to the proper placement, then place it before someone else complicates the area with other placements that invalidate your tile’s claim to the spot (the game uses Carcassonne rules where water has to match with water, ice with ice, etc.).

And does it work? Mostly, I think. But not without caveats.

What’s missing is the unknown or unexpected. With an array of tiles available to you, everyone sees what is available, and what likely will be available shortly. So rarely is there a moment that upends your understanding of the moment and forces you into a different tactical route altogether.

Sure, someone may unexpectedly burn an action point to beat you to a crucial action. But even this is broadly predictable. The ultimate sense of adventure is thus at least slightly diminished. Heck, you even know where the Northwest Passage is. It’s not randomized or anything. You merely have to path over to it.

That’s the downside. The upside is that the action point system works well to create tension, and the puzzle is both quickly discernible yet unable to be “solved.” And that’s because the actions of your fellow players can and will frequently affect what you can or should do. This is excellent.

There’s a set collection version of this game in an alternate universe that’s more forgiving and shunts some of the action to a personal player board, or widens your possible actions to give you almost-as-good options when something is stolen from you.

Instead, we get something better: you might really see the resources you were eyeing stolen away from you. And further realize that you strayed too far north to capture them, and so now you’re stuck in the ice for several rounds. Sure, your dog sled will roam the wilds and net you some points, but with far fewer nearby hotspots to inspect.

It’s sobering, a bit brutal, but better off for it. Because the flip side of that coin is that it’s not so brutal that someone is destined for futility in a game. Measured play generally yields competitive returns. So that long foray in the ice gives you time to think, since it was undoubtedly your own hubris that led to the situation.

Following such a failure, it might also be tempting to set off on your own, where no one can muck with you. Only to watch as players cleverly use each other’s tile placements to move faster than you, beating you to the Passage easily. Solitary play brings its own strategic downsides, despite the fact that you’ll be unopposed for many points.

So how to strike that balance? Therein lies the heart of the game.

Expedition: Northwest Passage Conclusions

Do I think that spending two action points to pick up a Cairn token is terribly exciting? Not generally. Or that the mini-game of set collection is the best way to realize the game’s theme? Probably not. The individual actions in this game almost never thrill.

But the whole of it works, because it creates a compelling narrative that unfolds due to interlocking player actions. You’re building and exploring together, competitively. Which is cool. It’s weird to play a game for the holistic experience but not the individual moments, but I find myself satisfied with the whole for this reason despite not being able to identify any one moment that created the feeling.

I think this makes the game a good one to play repeatedly with the same crew, so that you can feel the ebb and flow of the various broad strategies, and watch as you each flow between them, to varying levels of success. The nuance inherent in the action point system and “communal vs. isolated” approaches in the game should give it legs through numerous plays regardless, and despite the lack of truly exploratory feeling, it may be just as interesting to know the outcome but play to see how you get there.