In The Footsteps of Darwin: Correspondence Expansion Review
I’m not always a fan of board games getting expansions. That isn’t because they aren’t fun, it’s just that our group gets the same game tabled so little, does owning and expansion even worth it? What I do love are expansions that easily fold into the base game, provide only a little more time to teach, and make the experience so much better. We loved In the Footsteps of Darwin, and the Correspondence expansion just makes it better.
The expansion adds a brand new sideboard to the experience. The 5 point tiles that you use to earn for completing rows and columns are now replaced with column and row specific tiles that provide a variety of bonuses instead of just five points. The game also adds new characters / workers, new animals, and new mail tiles that we will talk about soon.
Everything here folds nicely into the base game, and the amount of teaching you need to do to add this in is pretty minimal. There are a few changes from the base game though, and we will go over each and review them below:
The Crown: In the base game, anytime you took an animal with the crown symbol, you would take the Charles Darwin figure, and whoever had that at the end of the game would get two points. There was never a real major incentive to take a token simply for the crown, so this felt like a throw away mechanic in our opinion. This new system has you moving the CHarles Darwin figure around a grid, earning bonuses as you go. This is a much better way of doing things, and a solid improvement over the original. One of the spots on the track allows you to pull tokens from a bag that represent the various animals and locations; you place that token on your board, and if you manage to put an animal in that location, you’ll earn some additional points.
Workers / Characters: In the base game, characters / workers were shuffled into the main deck of tiles and laid out on the central board. Now, they are taken out and shuffled into two stacks, and can be earned by using the brand new letter tokens (some of which you can earn via the new Charles Darwin grid we talked about above)! This is, once again, a fantastic change from the original, and makes it so there are always tons of animals available on the central board.
New Map Tiles: Old map tiles provided 5 points whenever you filled a row or a column on your player board. Now, there are unique tiles for each row and column, and the first player to complete the column or row will get the special tile; everyone else gets a 5 point tile.
The new mechanics here makes In the Footsteps of Darwin a much better experience. I think the base game is fine on it’s own, but once you play with the Correspondence expansion, you won’t be going back, and you’ll quickly realize that the game is so much better with the expansion.
While we still recommend the base game on its own, if you can afford to pick up the expansion as well, we think it is a worthwhile purchase. Your experience will be much better, in our opinion.
Article By Adam
