For all that board games thrive on taking us to new places, exploration is surprisingly hard to do well. Explorers of Navoria, designed by Meng Chunlin, is a prime example. Set in a colorful world redolent of Root’s woodland or Oath’s turbulent empire, and populated by critters who wouldn’t draw much side-eye in either setting, Explorers of Navoria is nominally about pushing the frontier ever outward, but more accurately about shifting one’s position on a number of slightly differentiated tracks. In the proper mode — a persnickety combination of player count, expansion, and headspace — it’s a tasty and visually appealing course that feels good going down even as it leaves the stomach rumbling minutes later.

There’s lots to explore out there.

To describe Explorers of Navoria is to divvy it into two halves. Think of them as expansion and contraction. In the first phase, players are asked to push outward, assigning discs to various decks to acquire cards in the market; later, they will reassign those discs back into the heartland that birthed them, earning resources and other sundries.

Each of these phases has its own appeal. The exploration phase is immediately rewarding. Either you draw a pair of those discs from a bag and select one, or else claim one of the previous discards. Either way, your… troupe? guild? I’m not sure, but whatever their role, they’ll nab a card from the market and put it into practice.

These cards, in addition to being easy on the eyes, are simple little things. Some move your explorers along tracks, one for each of the desert, jungle, and mountain, in order to plant flags and earn farthest-place bonuses. Others build outposts along those same tracks, pushing your starting space outward for future rounds. Those are the most dynamic; others are more straight-laced, earning resources that can be distributed across your player board’s three spaces to be cashed in for bonuses and points later, or perhaps building combos for later. There are suits to consider for end-game scoring, various species to monopolize for the same function, and the not-occasional coin or three. Coins are victory points, by the way, so don’t go expecting something more engaging.

And then, once the exploration is complete, Explorers of Navoria transforms into an ultra-light worker-placement shindig. Those same tokens return home, only this time the earnings are less tableau-ish. You earn a few more resources, a few more coins, and maybe turn in some of those resources for an extra few bonuses.

I do appreciate a vibrant tableau.

The secret to the game’s success isn’t really much of a secret. Everything is rewarding. Everything feels good. It’s like a casino where every slot machine is guaranteed to dump cherries and coins and colorful bits of ribbon in your lap. Never mind that the cherries are plastic and the coins hold no value. Explorers of Navoria is a masterwork at saying something loudly and often, but with very little meaning.

To be fair, that isn’t such a bad thing. At its best, Explorers of Navoria could hardly be described as a poor hang. It feels good to move up those tracks. It feels great to build an outpost and start a little farther out than last time. It feels nice to bring home a wagon full of crystals and swords, and even better to trade them in for some extra coins-slash-VPs.

Little by little, though, the sameness of the linoleum starts to show through. There’s the way every card sticks more or less to the same formula, maybe plus or minus a point, but never coughing up anything all that exciting. Or the way every combo looks like every other combo; there are those that reward coins for particular races, or those that trigger only at the end of the game for outposts, with very little room in between. This isn’t exactly a game that allows the player to discover something new, let alone forge their own way in the world. At least there’s some frisson of randomness there, courtesy of the draw-bag and the way the market populates with cards. It isn’t much. It isn’t enough. I’d call it a gesture in the right direction. But two plays is enough to realize you’ve already seen what Explorers of Navoria has to offer.

The turn markers are a microcosm of the game at large: pretty but tipsy.

It doesn’t help that some of the game’s best ideas are hidden away behind the expansion. Like actual rewards for moving along those tracks. Actual rewards apart from coins, I mean, such as bonuses for collecting the previously underwhelming warfare cards. Or like the faction draft that sees each player building their own opening combo, with starting cards and little abilities, complete with an extra resource that can be gathered on the map and churned into a new approach to the gameplay. Or like the addition of a sixth deck of cards in the market. This makes it possible to play with five players, but more importantly it allows the game to actually function at four.

Okay, I’ll back up. With the base game, each round sees players gathering four cards. Unless you have four people at the table. Then you only gather three. That’s the difference between nine and twelve cards at the end of the game. Playing with four means everybody is too pinched. It’s hard to move along any of those exploration tracks, let alone build a functional combo. With the expansion, however, now there’s enough to go around. Unless you bump the count to five players. Then you’re stuck gathering those three cards per round again.

It’s a weird way to gate a package’s content. Urp. Content. I hate thinking about board games like that. But in this case, it’s hard not to default to that way of thinking. The base game works well enough, but it works less well without the expansion. Despite all the color and the fanciful characters and the moment-to-moment lizard-brained pleasure of accumulation, it feels thin, like the precise number of cards were doled out to make the game playable but also a bit lean, just enough to leave everyone hungry for more.

Which leaves Explorers of Navoria in an odd space. Like I said earlier, it feels good to play. It’s tight. Players will likely wind up with comparable scores, borne of fifty trickles that sometimes contained a drop more or less than the others. But it’s still the equivalent of licking a damp cave wall for nourishment. It’s just that there are pretty pictures to look at and some technically serviceable levers to pull while your tongue laps at that smoothness.

The lion guy is a good hang.

What’s left is a board game that looks nice and feels nice, but never really does anything more. Which, look, is sometimes precisely what I want. This is an easy game to converse over, even if the variable turn order makes it a little more hostile to beer-and-pretzels than it might have otherwise been. But there are other options out there. Some of them feel less like hamster wheels. You’ve got better things to do with your time than march up and down the same featureless tracks.

A complimentary copy of Explorers of Navoria was provided by the publisher.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)