Fantasy Flight announced a new game yesterday, Discover: Lands Unknown. Trailer below.
More details can be found on Fantasy Flight's website, here: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2018/8/13/discover-lands-unknown/Discover: Lands Unknown is designed for 1-4 players by Corey Konieczka. In it, the players are tasked with surviving in one of 6 environments and trying to find a way home.
At ToastedCardboard we're very interested in Discover! We are big fans of cooperative games, and the artwork looks beautiful. The style seems very Ligne Claire and creates an animated movie feel. This looks like it may combine some of the elements that made 7th Continent great like the sense of exploration, gathering various items, working together to solve puzzles, but in a much more accessible package. Our review of 7th Continent is coming soon.
With Discover: Lands Unknown and Keyforge, Fantasy Flight is coining a new term: "Unique Game". The concept here is that each copy of Discover: Lands Unknown (that's a bit of a pain to type every time...) has a unique set of characters, lands, items, and events, so that your experience will be unique compared to all others. These pieces will be selected from a global pool of possibilities, and presumably some attempt at making balanced boxes will exist (similar to Keyforge). How well this will actually end up working in practice we will find out! We're intrigued by the prospect, but considering there are reportedly only going to be 5 'sessions' per box, are slightly worried it's designed to instead simply sell more boxes. At $60 per preorder, that's a lot for additional sessions if the replayability isn't great. Alternatively it could bypass some of the issues with current campaign based games, where the first playthrough is the best. You could play it through once, and if a different set of friends want to play with a separate copy, you would have a fresh experience.
Overall there's a lot to be excited about Discover! The value of any one review in the future will be hard to gauge, depending on the balance of the various boxes some experiences may be more interesting than others.
