Anyone up for Explorers of Ixalan?

Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Rokapoke continues to shamefully stall my inevitable triumph in Archenemy, but now there's a new product out that I was wondering if anyone wanted to try.

It looks like Explorers is able to work with 2 to 4 players. Basically, there are four precons, one for each of the factions in Ixalan...
  • The Legion of Dusk (B/W vampires)
  • The Brazen Coalition (R/B/U pirates)
  • The River Heralds (U/G merfolk)
  • The Sun Empire (G/R/W dinosaurs)
...and everyone plays a normal multiplayer game, except there's also a "board game" portion. It's a map of hexagonal tiles that can be flipped face-up when they are "discovered" and affect the gameplay.

I actually have no idea how to handle the board portion of this, as everyone has to be using the same board. Only way I can think of to make it work would be set up the board myself and "run" that part of the game while other people pilot the decks against each other (if I were not playing in the game but merely proctoring the tile portion, I would take a picture with my phone of the entire map flipped face-up so that I could reveal tiles when players discovered them even at times when I wasn't sitting at my computer at home, so I would not have any excuses—unlike Warhammer Quest). But I'm up for that. I just want to see how this thing plays. Or if anyone has a better idea for how to run it, let me know.
 
S

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
You know I'm up for it. The phone picture thing sounds fine to me, although it's too bad that you can't do something like when you do the maps in Warhammer. Maybe there's some generic hexagon tile/mapset somewhere on the Net that can be adapted? But really, the phone picture is fine :)
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Spiderman said:
Maybe there's some generic hexagon tile/mapset somewhere on the Net that can be adapted? But really, the phone picture is fine :)
Click to expand...
That would be cool, but it'd have to be something that a bumpkin like myself could use. I'll see if I can find anything...
 
S

Spiderman

Administrator
Staff member
Yeah, I know. It's probably involve Paint or Photoshop to get the text on the tiles and all that, so it's probably more trouble that it's worth.
 
M

Melkor

Well-known member
I like how repeatedly uploading pictures from your mobile phone is the less technologically involved option. But I'll play as well.
 
Mooseman

Mooseman

Isengar Tussle
I want the pirates... being from Pittsburgh, it just makes sense. If there was a zombie deck, I'd have to take that.
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Pittsburgh? Hm, shouldn't this be your card, then?


Dinosaurs and Pirates are accounted for. What'll it be, Melkor? You want vampires or merfolk?
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Oops. Thought I'd already asked, but I don't see it. Melkor, do you want the merfolk or the vampires?
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
In that case I shall guide the River Heralds to glorious victory! I have randomly determined a turn order of...

...Melkor, Mooseman, Oversoul, Spiderman.
 
Oversoul

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Silly me. I thought that some post covered it at some point, but I don't see it. The board starts out like this...



That looks much nicer than the one on my desk, because I had to stow it behind my computer monitor, but the concept is the same.

Once per turn (at sorcery speed), you can explore a tile. Exploring a tile costs the amount of mana shown on the tile. You can only explore a tile if it isn't connected to any tiles with a lower cost than it. So, once a coast tile is not connected to any unexplored water tiles, it's available to explore. Likewise, once a jungle tile is not connected to any unexplored coast tiles, it's available to explore. If you explore the last tile blocking a tile of higher value, you can use your scout marker on the available tile, reserving it until your next turn.

Tiles have varying effects, but never actively hurt the player who explored them. The three types of tile are Event, Quest, and Site. They all do whatever they say they do. Site tiles are persistent and can be captured by opponents whose creatures deal combat damage to the player with the Site tile. If you lose the game in some other way than taking combat damage, any Sites in your possession are removed from the game. One of the 6-cost tiles is always Orazca, a Site with some huge, obnoxious boost, but I forget the exact details. The other tiles are randomly pulled from their respective stacks (i.e. the game has 25 total water tiles that come in the box, but only 16 of them are used on the map).
 
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