There’s always been a bit of an identity crisis rattling around the copper-bottomed hull of Scythe. Jamey Stegmaier and Jakub Rozalski’s alt-history speak to one thing, those continental hamlets shaking at the approach of smoke-belching combat mechs. Then you play it and it’s about moving logs. And I say this as somebody with an above-average appreciation for the thing.

After multiple expansions and a spin-off for kids, Stegmaier and Rozalski are back at it with a proper sequel. It’s called Expeditions, and it swaps the battle-torn countryside for the barren tundras of Siberia, where a recent meteor fall has kicked off a series of otherworldly events. It’s a tantalizing excuse to groom your animal companion, check the bolt of your rifle, and hop into the old mech for one last adventure. It’s too bad the winter air doesn’t work any miracles on the series’ neuroses.

Wandering into the unknown.

Welcome to Siberia. Turns out, it’s very much like the hills of central Europe, at least near the base camp. Expeditions starts with everybody in the same space, the southernmost edge of a map that scatters up and outward like an overturned barrel of apples. Nearby there are scattered settlements. Women wash baskets of clothes down by the stream. Farmers harvest brittle stalks of grain in the shade of a fallen airship. A sawmill presides over the stubbled corpse of a forest.

There’s an aura of menace to these pastoral scenes that was largely absent from Scythe. A horse stands near the mouth to an abandoned facility. Within the darkened embrace of the forest, creatures sprout novel appendages. Men who wander too far unprotected return transformed in hideous and distressing ways.

It almost goes without saying that the presentation is immaculate. This applies to the game’s components and illustrations, which are handled with Stegmaier’s usual Midas touch, but also owes mention to the game’s subtler elements. The arrangement of the map, for example, with its already chilly tones draining to harsh and inhospitable whites and alien violets. Or the fragmentary nature of the landscape, pockmarked by a five-card offer that feels disorienting, even wrong. Something has gone terribly awry in this place, much the way something went terribly awry in our own timeline, when in 1908 a meteor airburst set off a twelve-megaton explosion that toppled two thousand square kilometers of trees like dominoes. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Rozalski’s world, something crawled free of the meteor and has set to work twisting the countryside and people to better suit its needs.

It’s hard not to come away from Expeditions without an inkling of Polish and Ukrainian anxieties about the atomic age and the soiled winds of Chernobyl. This is a journey into a poisoned place, one that evokes Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and more recent video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Chernobylite. This isn’t to call Rozalski’s vision derivative so much as emblematic. Hooded figures don high-tech gas masks. Strange anomalies friscalate the gravity around them. By entering this place, you are yourself entered and altered.

Outfitting my mech.

Conceptually, this idea of metamorphosis is central to the gameplay itself, although it takes some time to gather steam. Your initial actions are all about securing resources. This being a Eurogame in the Stegmaier tradition, there are a few to juggle. There are two combat resources for beating back the afflicted zone’s corruption. Coins represent victory points and stars track your progress in a handful of achievements, much as in Scythe. There are also workers, five types in all, who join your crew and are crucial because they trigger the powers of the cards you collect.

But the foremost of these many resources are the cards themselves. Most of your activities in Expeditions revolve around either gathering, moving, or upgrading cards. The whole thing could be described as a complex card-drafting game, which isn’t nearly as reductive as it might seem. When you aren’t stomping around the map or picking up a resource, you’re playing a card. You’ll always get a small resource reward for your troubles, but the bigger deal is the card’s ability. This requires the right worker, and then the card stays used until you take a rest to scoop everything back into your hand.

Every card is unique, adhering to three broad archetypes. Items are the most familiar, offering ongoing abilities that tweak your other actions. These can be activated manually, but it’s more efficient to graft them directly to your mech. This makes them permanent additions, but also removes them from circulation. The same goes for the other card types. Quests require you to reach a specific destination, at which point they become solved and increase the value of your end-game points. Meteors are powerful, but are often worth more when melded onto your board in exchange for a bundle of points.

In each case, the big question is whether to keep these cards around, functioning as renewable sources of resources and abilities, or place them out of reach by attaching them to your mech. Both are desirable in their own right. A healthy hand gives you the tools you need to succeed, but winning the game all but requires you to upgrade items, solve quests, and meld meteors. The question isn’t whether to attach a card, it’s when you can afford to do so.

Hence metamorphosis. By the end of your journey, what began as pilot, companion animal, and mech will have become something else. You’ll be decked out in weird technology, humming with meteor bits, and famous for your undertakings.

Stars lookin’ at our planet.

The hitch is that this process doesn’t require sacrifice. Every addition is all benefit. By traveling into this dangerous zone, full of alien fauna and possessed hussars, you don’t become stranger or less human. Only more badass.

It’s hard to complain that you aren’t mutated into a betentacled monstrosity when perpetual growth is very much the norm in board games, so I don’t want to oversell this particular detail as a problem. Rather, it’s telling of a deeper issue with Expeditions, and it’s exactly the same one Scythe suffered from. Stegmaier and Rozalski have gone out of their way to tell a story about a dangerous place that alters everybody and everything within its reach, only to stop short of using that fiction as anything other than pretty set dressing. The cards will transform you, but not a way that resembles the shambling soldiers or violated animals that populate the tiles and cards.

Nor, even, will there be any friction. Scythe may have been more interested in shuffling around logs than crashing armies into one another, but at least one’s rival factions could send your mechs and laborers packing, if only temporarily. Expeditions lacks even that. Rival mechs block tiles, and it’s possible somebody will ninja a card you wanted, but apart from that your fellow players act as little more than a game timer.

The biggest offender is the map. Everything about the game warns that you’re headed into precarious terrain, but there’s no reason to balk at uncovering one tile after another. Here be no dragons. Here be no thorn bushes. Here be nothing but a cozy stroll. Indeed, it isn’t long before the map has been revealed and players begin the arduous task of bouncing back and forth between locations to claim bonuses and resolve quests. It feels closer to a delivery service than an expedition, minus even the perils of precipitation or canine the average deliveryman must face.

It is, to put it baldly, very dull indeed. Oh, there’s still a race on. There are efficiencies to manage. Resources. Combos. And there’s plenty of pretty scenery to gaze upon on the way. I haven’t had a bad time with it, strictly speaking. But it wears thin before the end of a session. I’m relieved when it’s packed away and done, not eager to crack it open again. That alone marks it as distinct from Scythe.

Must… avoid… proboscis…

What to make of such a thing? Here is one of the handsomest settings ever put to cardboard, but its most alluring figments are entirely absent from the actual gameplay. In one recent session, a sequence of quests summed up my feelings. First I recovered the bones of a lost expedition. Then I hacked the robot guardians of a remote outpost. At last I communed with the beast. A creature beyond imagining, a mass of gravity-defying orbs and tentacles, and I had tapped into its consciousness.

And then I helped some farmers sweep a field.

We’ve all had those moments. Playing an RPG, we return to an earlier area and stumble across a rat-clearing quest we somehow missed on the first pass. Such occurrences are worthy of a chuckle. The great hero, slaying rodents.

In Expeditions, everything feels like that. Meeting an alien mind is as easily executed as some agricultural busywork. The requisite costs differ, but only a touch. Had one been tougher than another by a greater margin, I would have pursued an easier quest anyway, since they’re all alike in the end. It’s the very definition of superficial. Stegmaier and Rozalski have created something gripping. If only they’d translated that narrative onto the tabletop. I’ve had roadside picnics that were more hazardous.

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A complimentary copy was provided.