Borealis: Arctic Expeditions

• Designer: Dariusz Mindur
• Publisher: Lucky Duck
• Players: 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 45 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Become the leaders of scientific teams venturing into uncharted boreal territories to observe and photograph the Arctic’s most adorable inhabitants. Play cards from your hand to one of 3 locations on your player board to snap a photo and send your scientists sliding to the left and to the right – but only if their colors match the ones printed on your card! Line up vehicle symbols, race to claim objectives, and arrange animals in pre-determined end-game scoring patterns to earn the most points and gain everlasting fame at the Society for Polar Inquiry. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even get your own tiny snow-covered island named after you.

To set up, shuffle the deck of animal cards and make a market of 4 face up cards.  Randomly choose 2 scoring cards and one objective card of each of the three types and place them on the table.  Each player gets their own board (agree whether to play on the symmetric side or the asymmetric side), with flags at the top of each of the three exploration columns and one scientist of each of the three colors also atop each column.  Players also get a starting hand of four cards, and players may discard and redraw once..

On a turn, the active player can either Observe an Animal or Regroup. 

To Observe an Animal, you play a card from your hand, placing it in a location that has the scientists shown on the card.  Stack the cards so you can see the bottom parts.  Move the scientists in the direction of the arrows on the card. If the vehicle on the card matches one of the vehicles on the space below your flag on the location’s track, move the flag down one space.  Refill your hand with a card from the market, and then refill the market.  You can always take mystery meat.  You can also spend 1VP to flush the market exactly once before drawing.

To Regroup, you discard as many cards as you want from your hand and draw that many new cards from the deck.  Score 1VP (take tokens) for each scientist in your camps.  Take all the scientists from both of your camps and place them in a single location.

After your turn, if you have accomplished any of the Objectives, declare it and take a 5VP token.  Until the end of the current round, anyone else who accomplishes the objective also scores 5VP.  At the end of the round, discard the Objective card.

The game ends at the conclusion of any round when one or more players has 7 cards in one location.  Finish the round so that players all have the same number of turns. Scoring is then completed:

• Score for sets of animals of the same species in a single location (chart on the player board)
• Point values for each space on your tracks where your flag is
• Some of  your animal cards will award VPs directly
• Score the two scoring cards based on the criteria on the card
• All VP tokens collected during play

The player with the most points wins; ties broken in favor of the player with the flag furthest down the exploration track.

My thoughts on the game

Borealis: Arctic Expeditions has turned out to be a nice surprise from Spiel 2025.  For me, Lucky Duck has always been a game company that I have turned to for their app-integrated games (Chronicles of Crime, etc) – and I honestly haven’t had as much success with their analog-only games.   The animal theme of the game and the promise of a challenging puzzle solving game were more than enough though to attract my interest and make me want to try it – and tl;dr the game delivers on its promises.

The crux of the game is finding the best card to play as well as the best place to play.  This decision has so many different levels, it’s hard to consider them all. To wit:

• Which location will you play it in?  You need to have the requisite scientists there in order to play it
• Where do you want your scientists to end up – this will come important for later card plays and/or scoring in the recovery turns.  It can be useful to have a lot of scientists in the igloos as they all come back to a single space when you recover; and this gives you LOTS of options on your next turns.
• Will the card play advance your flag – good bonus points can be had if you can move the flag far enough down your three columns.  There are only 7 spaces in the track, and you can play at most 7 cards in a column, so if you want to get the huge rewards – they all have to cause your flag to move
• Does the animal icon on the card match those played previously?  Another big component of scoring is the reward for sets of the same icon; again remember that you will only play a max of 7 cards to a column, so each non-match greatly reduces your max possible score
• Does the card help you towards one of the three Objectives?  Sure, you’ll have to keep an eye out on what your opponents are doing; but getting a 5VP jump on some/all of your adversaries is nothing to sneeze at
• Does the card help you towards the two end-game scoring cards?

As you can guess, the game does have a fair potential for Analysis Paralysis – as it is extremely rare that any card in your hand would be able to meet all of the above criteria (or any other criteria that my little brain isn’t even able to add to the list).  I suppose that you could really try to run through every option on each turn – I generally just think until I find something that seems pretty great and run with it.  After all, it’s just a game :)

For me, it becomes a delightful challenge of figuring out the best play you can make from the four cards in your hand.  There is just enough leash to let you try to plan things out in advance, and it does feel rewarding when you make a play of two or three chained actions that get you to the place you want to be in.  

I suppose that you could go all game and never have to Regroup – by choosing and playing cards that kept your researchers in play – but, between the VP reward as well as the clumping of researchers and the dumping of unwanted cards from your hand, it’s definitely a viable option to take on your turn.

Our games are closer to an hour right now, and I don’t know if that’s because we’re slow or still getting used to the game.  I can definitely see where the game could come into the 45 minute range; and I also think there are viable strategies to speeding up the game by pushing one location to 7 cards quickly – though we haven’t seen games in that time window just yet.  Borealis is a great puzzle of a game, and a nice counterpoint to the QR-code driven games that I have generally associated with the publisher.   It will definitely get more plays this winter.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Doug G.: I understand why people like/love this one, but it’s a bit too puzzly for Shelley and me. We enjoyed our plays, though the scoring options can create very different outcomes and the luck of the cards can play a big role as well. We did a YouTube review here: https://youtu.be/j0hrMsEsUWs

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale Y, Steph H
• Neutral. Doug G.
• Not for me…