Explorers & Exploiters

In Explorers & Exploiters, you are one of several leaders over a people, exploring and exploiting the resources of a New World. However, you also lead the barbarians fighting against the people.

Each player starts with a number of settlements in different sizes; hamlets, villages, towns and cities. The first player to place all of them on the board is the winner.

The world is made up of tiles of different kinds - foundations for settlements, resources necessary for settlements, and useless wastelands. At the start, the world is terra incognita and all tiles are turned face down, waiting to be explored by the units.

The units in the world are of two kinds - explorers and barbarians. They do not belong to particular players but any player may act with them. Explorers may explore a tile (move to it and look at it privately) or exploit a tile (turn it face up and make it available for all players). Barbarians on the other hand plunder tiles and turn them face down again.

By turning tiles face up or face down, players may make more or less resources connected to settlements. This allows the settlement to be expanded or expelled and the player to replace the existing settlement with one from the hand.

The challenge of the game is to play the common units so that the right settlement can be played in the right place at the right time.

There are no such things as ”mine” and ”yours”, nor such things as ”good” and ”evil”. All units are commonly played, whether they be explorers or barbarians. To win, you must use the common resources to rise above the commons, not unlike the challenges of a real leader!