Lewis & Clark 2nd Edition

In Lewis & Clark, players take on the roles once held by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. These two explorers’ aim was to discover the western region of the U.S. in 1803. This is the 2nd Edition of Lewis & Clark, from Ludonaute. Cedrick Chaboussit has introduced a couple of tweaks from the original 2013 game, while retaining the core features. The aim of the game remains – it’s a race, the first to reach the Pacific Coast. It’s a marathon, not a sprint!

In Lewis & Clark, players start with a crew of six multi-use cards. You’ll need to use smart hand management skills to use these in wise ways to get the most out of them. Each crew member has a unique ability, but needs help from another card, which ‘powers’ the action. Some of the cards grant you resources based on not only the tableau that you create, but those of your neighbours, too. You have to decide which cards you’ll use right now for their abilities, and which you’ll use for their ‘strength’…

As the game progresses you’ll want to improve your hand of cards, in a deck-building fashion. (There are some new, improved character cards in this 2nd Edition!) You can also dabble in some worker placement – but there’s a clever twist. Here, once you place a worker, it’s no longer yours. You have to play a certain crew card to get all the public workers back into your possession! You can’t just grab all the workers all the time, though. A crucial part of Lewis & Clark is camping. This is when you decide to pick up your whole tableau and start your hand management over again.

This involves smart resource management. If you camp with over-burdened boats, you lose precious time. In this 2nd Edition, the rules with camping have changed ever-so-slightly. Now instead of moving backwards down-river (ouch!) you take on camping penalty tokens, instead. You need to pay these off before you can progress again.

There’s a couple of other minor new rules for this 2nd Edition. One is you now jump over other players as you pass them; you do not count their space itself. Second, when you camp beyond Fort Clatsop (the finish line), you need to have fewer camp tokens than the camp symbols on that space. Other than that, this is the same old glorious Lewis & Clark!

Player Count: 1-5 Players
Time: 120 minutes
Age: 14+