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My favourite type of expansion is a ‘more stuff’ expansion, one that gives you more of what you already love. Intrepid Mission Critical is a ‘more stuff’ expansion. It contains four new countries, one new disaster including Irregularity cards, and four new career badges. So, it’s got more stuff. But is that stuff any good?
The New Countries
Let’s start by taking a detailed look at the headline feature of this expansion: the four new countries. In general, they are more complex than the ones in the base game. Germany gets two stars for complexity, Malaysia three stars, then Brazil and the United Kingdom receive a whopping four stars. If you thought the countries in the base game were too complex, then be very wary of this expansion.
Germany
Germany has you rolling all of your dice into storage. If a dice is in storage, you can’t use it. You have to get them into your pool first. You do this by paying for dice with dice. For example, you could give up a 6 die to take out two 3s. You could pay for a 4 die with a 5. Or in a really good situation, you could give up a 6 and take out two 1s and two 2s.
If your initial roll is all 4s, 5s, and 6s, you’re in a bit of trouble. You’re only going to be receiving one dice for every dice you discard. Luckily, your tiles help you by allowing you to roll dice into your pool and also manipulate the dice in your storage.
Germany is a good country for people who shy away from the more complex countries. It’s still fun though as you try to work out just how you’re going to get enough dice out of storage to fill your tiles and generate those precious resources.
Malaysia
Malaysia has a very simple special rule: your dice don’t wrap. So now, if you increase the value of a 6 by one, it doesn’t become a 1 as usual, you lose it. It’s the same if you decrease a die below 1, you lose it. Funnily enough, the majority of your tiles either increase or decrease the values on your dice.
One of your tiles requires 4-6 in two slots. To activate this tile, you use other tiles to increase the values of your dice. But when you finally get to use the tile, its power is to increase all of your dice by 2 which will probably make you lose some of your dice if you haven’t been very careful.
When you play as Malaysia in Intrepid Mission Critical, you have to become an expert wafter, a bit like the professional wafters at Alton Towers who waft you into your parking space. First, you waft the values one way to access certain tiles. Then you waft them back the other way to access others. But all the time you don’t want to lose any of your dice from excessive wafting. It’s all a careful balancing act.
Again, Malaysia is a lot of fun to play. It’s as complex as Japan from the base game and certainly leads to some brain-burny moments. You have to carefully consider the order in which you do things to make sure you don’t lose any of those precious dice. Malaysia may require a lot of mental processing power but the following countries are a step up even from that.
Brazil
Brazil’s main feature is that many of your tiles start out locked. Thematically, it doesn’t sound like a great idea to lock vital systems, but it’s great for gameplay. On each locked tile you add a small token that shows three numbers, for example, 1,4,5. To unlock that tile all of the dice in your pool need to be either 1s, 4s or 5s. They could all be 1s and 4s, or even all 5s. But if you’ve got one 2 lurking around in the depths of your pool, the tile remains tightly locked.
Now imagine at the start of the round where you can have up to 13 dice. You’ve got to somehow get these to be only three values to even unlock one of your locked tiles. This is tricky. Luckily, your other tiles may help you in doing this, plus you always pass dice to other players if you’re desperate. Unlocking tiles get easier as the round goes on as you have fewer dice in your pool, but it still requires some careful planning.
Brazil is one of my favourite countries to play. Unlocking all of those tiles at the start seems insurmountable but as you manipulate your dice you can pick away at them one by one until you’ve got everything available. It’s very satisfying.
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom is by far the hardest country to get your head around. It has a system of counter dice where at the start of the game each counter is set to 3. To access a tile with a counter die you have to play a die with a higher value. When calculating resource generation, you only get to use the counter value though. At the end of the round, the die you placed becomes the new counter. At any time, you can take the counter die into your pool and replace it with a 1 die. This is very handy for getting rid of those pesky 6s.
Planning for subsequent rounds in Intrepid Mission Critical is vital with the United Kingdom. It’s all well and good if you’ve produced tonnes of resources this round, but then all your counters go back down to 1 and you’re generating virtually nothing. And then you die. You have to aim to have your counters on a variety of numbers both to equalise your resource generation and also to give you more options. Some tiles allow you to set dice in your pool to adjacent counter dice, so having different counters will give you greater flexibility.
I’ve played with the United Kingdom tiles four times and I still haven’t completely got a grip on them. They’re especially tricky to play with at the higher difficulty levels as it becomes even more important that you get your counter values right. This is another solid country though rounding off an excellent array of new countries.
What’s The New Disaster Like
The new disaster sees you trying to weather a huge solar storm. When the storm hits, it fries one of your tiles. To show this you place three scenario cubes on it. From now on, to use this tile you have to put a strain token on it. At the end of each round, you will lose one cube from each of these scorched tiles. When you remove the last cube, you lose that tile.
In general, I like this new disaster in Intrepid Mission Critical. It forces you to buy new tiles constantly to keep on top of the ones that you’ve lost.
There is one card though that I would advise you to remove from the game with urgent haste. It scorches all previously unscorched tiles. Think about that for a minute. Now everything is scorched. And you have limited strain tokens to use. After this card came out in a game, we were each down to using at most three tiles in a given round, and even sometimes two. It killed the game. There was virtually zero puzzling to be done to fill three tiles and then put the rest of your dice in the middle. Awful.
But remove this card and the solar storm disaster is challenging yet fun. By all means, try using the card before you destroy it in a fiery pit. Just be aware that it could be somewhere in that disaster deck waiting to shine really brightly at you and give you red-eye.
New Career Badges
The career badges are my least favourite part of this expansion. I generally play this game at two players and two of the new badges seem to work better at four players. Even so, you pick and choose from these and the ones in the base game to give you the best chance of fulfilling your missions.
Final Thoughts
Overall, this is a fantastic expansion. If you like Intrepid, and you’d love some more variety, then Intrepid Mission Critical is perfect for you. It’s certainly not essential - the base game, Intrepid, works very well without it – but it drastically increases the lifespan of the game. This one comes highly recommended.
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