Scouting Ahead

You've awoken to find yourself far from home. The vast wilderness stretches before you, the days are long and every night is a struggle to survive. While you’re not sure how you ended up here, you know that answers won’t come from sitting around the meager campsite you’ve constructed. You’ll need to explore to find food, water, and most importantly, a way home!

Join us today as we look at how to get your bearings and explore the world around you in Discover: Lands Unknown!

Discover: Lands Unknown is a Unique Game, meaning every copy in the world is different. Through a sorting algorithm, the combination of components found in your game will be unlike any other copy in existence. While your group of survivors may find themselves stranded in a dense forest or on a freezing mountaintop, your friend’s copy may see a different group of survivors trying to escape a deserted island or harsh desert. However, each game is still monitored by the same set of rules that will guide you in your journey into the unknown.

Important note: Our preview will show as little of the components in Discover: Lands Unknown as possible, but if you want to go into the game completely blind, you'll want to turn back now!

Means of Escape

Before we examine how you move and explore your environment, it’s important to understand why you would ever venture away from your campsite. Every game of Discover: Lands Unknown will begin with you starting one of five scenarios found in your box. Four of these scenarios tell a larger story together, while the fifth is focused on a more competitive version of the game.

Each scenario includes a set of quest cards which gives you your initial goal. By completing the objectives on your quest cards can advance through the stages and eventually find a way home—but you also have to make sure you survive to escape by locating food, clean water, medicine, and shelter.  

Like many of the components found in Discover: Lands Unknown, the exact set of scenarios you receive will differ from game to game. You’ll never know exactly what you're going to find, but you can be sure you won’t make much progress by the safety of campfire.

Explore Your Surroundings

In a single game of Discover: Lands Unknown, you'll need to explore your surrounding and gather resources during the day, before you try to survive the deadly night. On your turn during the day phase, you can take a variety of actions, including scrounging for food, searching for shelter, or exploring and scouting your surroundings, which is what we’ll be focusing on today!

During your turn, you can perform as many actions as you want, but every action drains your survivor's stamina, and that’s a dangerous proposition in unfamiliar territory. Since every action reduces your stamina, you can end your turn anytime you want, but you must stop if your stamina hits zero. Forging ahead into unexplored territory will help you complete objectives, but ending your turn away from the safety of a campfire can have serious repercussions.

Your character tracker will keep track of both your stamina and the damage you've taken, which we'll explore in a later preview!

The Light of the Day

One of your basic actions in Discover: Lands Unknown is the move and gather action. By spending at least one stamina, you can move from one space to another and gather any resources that may be found there in the form of a feature token.

While moving from space to space in clear terrain only takes one stamina off your gauge, you may find obstacles in your exploration. Difficult terrain has different stamina costs, a reference sheet included with your copy of the game will give you a chart to determine how much stamina it takes to move into specific types of terrain.

Jenna decides to take a couple move and gather actions. Her first move sees her traversing heavy snow. Checking the reference sheet, she sees this costs two stamina and adjusts her character tracker appropriately. She decides to take another move and gather action, the next space is primarily comprised of regular snow, which costs only one stamina to enter. If either of these spaces had a feature token, she could gather it for free!

Of course, recklessly diving into the wilderness is folly for any survivor. You’ll have to scout out new tiles before forging ahead into new territory, and may find more than you bargained for.

At the beginning of a game of Discover: Lands Unknown, most of the tiles are facedown, shrouding the map in mystery. When you're on the edge of explored space, you can spend one stamina to perform a scout action and flip over an adjacent tile! This tile may reveal new sources of water and resources, vital to survival, as well as resource tokens, ripe for the taking. We’ll explore how these resource tokens can help you in a future preview!

At the start of the game, Jenna has scouted the tile above her starting location. Her next step would be placing feature tokens on the spaces marked with a square!

The Darkness of Night

After every player has taken their turn during the day, the night begins—and as darkness falls over unfamiliar terrain, your only thought is to survive. After every survivor has taken their turn, the group collectively draws a night card. On one hand, these night cards will replenish at least six stamina for all survivors as they get whatever rest they can. However, night cards are also a gut check on your resources. Some will inflict you with hunger, forcing you to dig into your supply of food or take damage. Others will move enemies around the board, or create even more dangerous situations.

Those who end their turn away from the safety of a campfire face additional risks, as some night cards will direct survivors sleeping in the wild to draw a threat card. While night cards provide at least some respite in the form of stamina regeneration, threat cards bring you face-to-face with the dangers lurking in the dark. In the darkness, you may become all too familiar with the mysteries of the wilderness, but you can never be sure what the darkness will bring. 

If you manage to survive the night, the day phase begins again and survivors are free to continue exploring the wilderness, but more challenges await. You’ll have to fight terrifying enemies, find sources of clean water and unravel the mystery of your stranding if you have any hope of escape! These mechanics and more will be featured in future previews, so keep your eye on the website in coming weeks.

The Call of Adventure

Tiles, scenarios, and threat cards are all a part of what makes your copy of Discover unique. But although every copy is different, your scenarios will tell a coherent, thrilling story, the threats you face will be dynamic and connected, and the two biomes included in your game will offer fresh new ways to play. Discover: Lands Unknown is a game unlike any other; how will you make your escape?

Find a way home with Discover: Lands Unknown (DSC01), available now for pre-order from your local retailer or our website!