I don’t read comics, or at least that used to be the case. While I still don’t count myself an enthusiast, Mind MGMT, the inaugural title by Off the Page Games, introduced me to Matt Kindt’s series of the same name — and a wider world of comics than I had previously known existed. Harrow County, the imprint’s second effort, didn’t spark my affection quite so thoroughly, but that’s a tall bar to clear.

Now Jay Cormier and Sen-Foong Lim are back at it. This time they’re tackling a brutal comic series by Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts called Manifest Destiny. In a wise marketing move, Cormier and Lim have switched the title to Corps of Discovery — it’s pronounced “core,” lest the headline lead you astray — and mechanically, it’s one of the most enthralling cooperative games I’ve played in ages. I’m of two minds about it.

Exploring North America. For the first time. With a huge asterisk.

As you can probably deduce from the comic’s title, Manifest Destiny and Corps of Discovery tackle a rather loaded topic. The series follows the 1804 expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to chart the Louisiana Purchase and establish a firm claim over the territory for the United States. The alt to this alt-history is that the expedition is not only beset by weather, terrain, and native tribes, but also horrible monsters, otherworldly portals, and deal-brokering devils. There’s butchery enough to make one queasy.

To be sure, that bloody-mindedness is an important component of the comic’s identity. In his preamble to the omnibus, Chris Dingess describes how the series stumbled early on, becoming almost glib as it chased the highs of pitting colonial explorers against hulking minotaurs, mind-devouring parasites, and Volkswagen-sized mosquitos. Sacagawea is introduced as a midriff-baring hottie with a spear, as much a sex object as a warrior and guide. The white leaders of the expedition are racist, but also plucky, brave, and charming. An entire cast waits in the wings, barely characterized until the authors remembered they needed to focus on something other than the monster of the month. At times, any broader point is subsumed by the thrill of the hunt, usually with our protagonists unsure whether they’re pursuer or prey. It’s only in the later volumes that Manifest Destiny stops being so distracted by the voyeuristic sheen of an exposed liver.

In other words, one of the things that makes Manifest Destiny fascinating is the way it illustrates the allure of its titular myth, sometimes on purpose and other times by accident, that crossing into the unknown and parlaying native populations into subservience through diplomacy, threats, or direct violence is good and righteous and necessary. It’s hardly the first work of satire to be temporarily mesmerized by its subject matter. It isn’t even a particularly big one, considering the presence of Warhammer 40k in this hobby. But it’s there all the same, a vacillating story about the perils of nation-building that can’t help but make a case for the target in its sights.

This isn’t a review of the comic. As an adaptation, however, Corps of Discovery inherits its parent’s topic and tone. To a large degree, it also inherits the comic’s distractability. This is a game about claiming ground, slaying monsters, and looking very cool doing it. Which is to say, it’s more about the derring-do of the comic’s first half than the brooding and self-doubts of the second.

This is a resource and crisis management game, too.

To be clear, though, the monster-slaying is very, very cool.

As a game, Corps of Discovery is redolent of logic puzzles like Minesweeper or Sudoku. At the outset of any given chapter, you’re presented with a blank map of the environs, supposedly pristine but brimming with untapped resources and potential danger. You also have a rubric of basic information. Some of this stuff is common sense: trees mean nearby water, tribes will have pitched their teepees near forage, mountains sprout in clusters. Others are more gamey but no less important, such as the detail that wood will only be found once per column or row, or that monsters will always appear on the periphery of the land claimed by local tribes.

Turns, then, have a dedicated rhythm. First you reveal a space, one bordering the terrain you’ve already cleared. Cormier and Lim have created quite the system here, a method by which a map is blindly inserted into a board covered by blank terrain tokens. Removing a token exposes the terrain underneath. Most spaces present some opportunity or another, usually in the form of resource tokens. Forests provide timber. Mountains produce flint. Monster dens are resplendent with bones, which, um, you need for some reason. Springs provide fresh water, which by the way is effectively your expedition’s health gauge. Some chapters see you gathering mushrooms or flowers. All of them require that you find at least one berry by the end of the day or your crew will starve.

Speaking of days, each one is divided into three crises. After revealing a space, you place the token on the top of the current crisis card. After a certain number of tokens, usually two or three, it’s time to see whether you’ve resolved that problem. This provides a framework for each turn, not to mention the game’s propulsion and some essential backstory. Maybe your food is going bad. So you either spend some timber, a piece of flint or bone, and a ration of water to dig a cooling pit, or you lose three water tokens. If you pass the test, having a fire awards an extra berry. It’s quartermaster work, but with enough immediacy that you’re nearly always on the ragged edge of survival.

And there are heaps of the things, both generic cards and chapter-specific crises. Maybe a member of your crew has been captured by carnivorous birds and you need to bring them a suitable meal or you’ll lose some manpower. Or a storm is blowing in and you need to ensure you have shelter set up or the rain will douse your hard-built fires. Or you’ve uncovered monster tracks, some big beastie lurking around the edges of the expedition, and you need to set up a decoy lest it make off with some essential supplies. These provide a series of immediate goals to tackle, but they’re rarely straightforward pass/fail checks. Clever players will soon discover that they don’t need to pass every test. Indeed, given your longer-term objectives, resolving every crisis is often a surefire way to ensure you don’t have enough time or resources to defeat your actual foe.

Each scenario forces your crew to bypass different challenges.

The identity of that foe depends on the chapter. Corps of Discovery marches directly through the story of Manifest Destiny, confronting players with the same monsters that dominate each of the comic’s volumes. To succeed, you need to slay the monster in question before dying of hunger or dehydration.

In the process, the same inventiveness that was evident in both Mind MGMT and Harrow County are on full display. In the first chapter, the expedition finds itself under siege by roving minotaurs. With buffalo heads. Buffalotaurs. To get moving, you need to confront the things. Except you have no idea how to slay such monsters. The scenario, then, puts you at the mercy of your rivals. When they appear on the map, they lock down their entire row and column. If you want to explore within that monster’s hunting grounds, you need to pay one of your precious resources. To succeed, you need to uncover frontier forts; these teach you how to lay traps. The result is a constant tension between needing to push outward, being hemmed in by buffalotaurs, and gathering the necessary knowledge and resources to kill the things.

It would have been easy for Cormier and Lim to replicate that same formula with only slight variations, but each chapter provides its own map configurations, characters and abilities, unique crises, and most of all, new terrors and methods for dispatching them. Burning the mind-controlling fauna of the second chapter requires that players explore terrain in a specific sequence, putting their logic skills to the test while under assault. In another, a monstrous toad separates the crew from its keelboat and must be distracted so that essential resources can be ferried back and forth. The fourth chapter, which also happened to be the last one the prototype included, was dominated by a head-stealing pterodactyl that soars across the map. Our task was to shepherd it into firing lines. Except the monster’s movements are semi-random and alter depending on which portions of the map have been revealed. Again, a crucial tension was revealed: we needed to play the odds, position our sharpshooters smartly, and stave off any crisis that might reduce our manpower.

In each case, it’s hard to overstate just how good this all feels. Corps of Discovery is delightfully cerebral at every level, a nested puzzle with vicious sensibilities. Every move is both immediate and part of a larger concern. Usually multiple concerns. There’s the terrain you’re uncovering right this instant, along with whatever resource or threat you’re hoping to discover or avoid, the current crisis that must be settled or dismissed, the character abilities that can only be used once per day, not to mention whichever creature you’re hoping to defeat. There’s wiggle room for missteps, especially early on, and it isn’t uncommon for everybody to wonder if this is as tough as it gets — until the third day or so, when you realize you’re low on water, can’t find any berries, need to either build a fire or set up camp, you’ve lost half your men to boars with mushrooms coming out their eyes, and you’re still four steps shy of putting down the main monster. A game for the faint-hearted, this is not.

Life on the frontier is unkind.

Which makes Corps of Discovery doubly intriguing, because as an adaptation of the comic’s survivalist ethos, it’s unparalleled. In Dingess’s telling, it wasn’t uncommon for the crew to face a handful of mortal calamities at once, problems that were deadly enough on their own but compounded into real pickles put together. As in the comic, solving these conundrums usually requires some combination of cleverness, brute force, and sacrifice. More than once, we’ve found ourselves faced with a challenge that seemed impossible until we put our heads together, measured our resources, triggered our character abilities at precise moments, and accepted that our shelter might blow over or some of our crew would become monster chow.

At the same time, where the game’s gaze is steadfast when regarding monster-slaying and all the attendant gore, it flinches at reading the portents in the offal. The portions I’ve seen welcome and adapt the external events of Manifest Destiny, but offer none of the comic’s internality or self-reflection. There is no whiff of mutiny from the crew’s convicts, no danger of rape for the survivors rescued from a French palisade, no desperate loyalty from Clark’s slave York, no marching into a native camp in full battle dress, no slaughtering temporary allies now that the immediate foe has been defeated. The severed limbs are laid before the player, but with no one to wonder aloud whether the cause that detached them was worth the maiming.

I get it. Adaptation requires editing, and board games speak a different language than linear narratives. It would be a dour game indeed, and very likely an unintentionally hilarious game, that paused to look you in the eye and say, “Hey. You. Is your comfort worth the violence that was necessary to achieve it?” Hey man, we’re just trying to find a skull so we can assemble a buffalotaur trap.

Then again, this is also the design team that filled Mind MGMT with an underlying sense of paranoia, a faithfulness to the source material that extended beyond the external. And we’re living in the middle of a golden age of board game design, one in which plenty of titles manage to be both enjoyable and offer clear-eyed perspectives on history or literature. Take, for example, the game’s natives. Tribes appear on the map as a space players can encounter when they explore. Uncovering a teepee is a boon, letting you make a one-for-one swap of resources. More than once, coming across a tribe has saved my bacon. But you will never happen across a tribe that refuses aid, or only grants it under duress, or perhaps prefers a buffer zone of monsters between them and the growing United States. The monsters in Corps of Discovery have a will of their own. Your characters, the local tribes, the crew you throw to their deaths, not so much.

Preparing an ambush for a passing head-snatcher.

To be clear, I’m not saying this one specific thing should have been included. Rather, I’m merely noting that Corps of Discovery does such a tremendous job of adapting the comic to cardboard that the portions where it declines such an adaptation feel like the omissions they are. Only a game as good as this one could make me wish it had done more. It reproduces the art, the thrills and terrors, the ground gone black and muddy with blood. More than that, it’s an excellent cooperative puzzle game, with immaculate logic puzzling and perfect scenario design. There’s a lot of meat on this bone. Perhaps its later chapters will provide that extra gristle I’m looking for. If they don’t, it’s already one of the smartest and freshest co-op games I’ve played in a long time.

Corps of Discovery launches tomorrow on Kickstarter.

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A prototype copy was temporarily provided.