A new expansion for well-regarded game Hidden Ark has turned up on Gamefound—or do I mean Kickstarter? The now complete crowdfunding campaign ran on Kickstarter last year, but the late pledge manager is currently on Gamefound. This sort of thing is not unusual, but it does add to the confusion about how crowdfunding actually works.
Hidden Ark: Wild Oceans adds event cards, exploration cards and reward cards—but that’s all pretty meaningless unless you know what the base game is.
Hidden Ark, designed by Tobias Hall and published by All or None Games in 2023, is a 2–4 (5 if you happen to have the 2024 Deep Sea Expedition expansion player game (with a solo/cooperative mode) in which your task is to rescue fish species before they become extinct. Actually, your task is to gain as many victory points as you can, but saving endangered species is the main way to do that.
On each turn, you first draw an ‘opportunity token’—these provide resources or offer benefits such as additional movement steps. Next, you perform an action from the 4 available (and you have to take a different action than that used in your previous turn):
· move 1 or more research ships towards a reward, rescuing a fish species if your ship is on the relevant tile and you can fulfil the indicated requirements (e.g., giving up resources or having sufficient rescue ships);
· build an additional ship, placing it at an existing science station, or a new science station in an available marked space;
· perform research, moving up the relevant resource scales; or
· upgrade an action, gaining you extra bonuses when you next play that action.
When only a certain number (depending on player count) of fish species remain to be rescued, more are added to the board; this happens twice and the game ends on the third such refill. Final scores are calculated based on rescued fish species, victory point tokens (which I have to say seem like rather arbitrary additions to the map, leaping out of the theme of the game like a character breaking the fourth wall in a movie or book), numbers of science stations and research vessels, and awards such as having most fish species from specific oceans.
Cooperative and solo modes are mere beat-your-last-score games. However, co-op has a neat twist in that the final score is the minimum of all players’, so it pays to make sure everyone is getting support in reaching targets.
Sadly, the campaign page says very little about the Wild Oceans expansion, though answers to a couple of questions in the comments section explain events and the campaign mode to some degree. Events affect players globally and can be positive or negative; an event card is drawn at the start of the game and on each refill, and applies until the next reset. Rewards are sort of prizes at the end of a game, which will provide players specific benefits in the next game(s) in a sequence of 3.
But anyway, at a smidge over £6, the expansion itself is a very tiny part of the campaign rewards—like many other campaigns ostensibly about expansions, this is really a chance to boost sales of the base game. Other similar campaigns, such as DinoGenics: New Arrivals, have used the opportunity to update the base game or at least to schedule a reprint, but Tobias has stated that this campaign is partly about selling their existing stock of games—not necessarily a bad thing, though, since the game is already nicely polished, and at least he’s being up front about it.
The game’s previous expansions are also available as add-ons in this campaign.
The game is attractive, featuring Angela Rizza’s gorgeously detailed illustrations, and I like that the map of the world is available in different projections: the familiar Mercator projection and a Polar projection, which gives more a realistic representation of distances. The player boards are intriguing, constructed like the top layer of a dual-layer board, with spaces for tokens; good for placing components, but this does make them rather fragile and vulnerable to damage at the slivers of cardboard either end of the resource scales. I think I’d be inclined to glue a suitably sized cardboard rectangle to the bottom, to avoid that problem as well as add some strength—or buy the previously mentioned Deep Sea Expedition expansion which includes proper dual-layer boards.
Verdict
I can’t say a lot about the Wild Oceans expansion, because the campaign description contains so little about it! The events could improve replayability by adding variability across rounds, but it’s not clear how much effect the rewards will have across the sequence of games in a campaign.
However, I like the Hidden Ark game, and maybe the expansion crowdfunding campaign is doing a good enough job in bringing the game to people’s attention. It has a generally positive theme about saving animals from extinction (if only it was as easy in real life), and gameplay is warm and fuzzy: you get something beneficial on every turn, for example. The co-op variant of the game acts nicely to encourage players to look out for each other, though the solo mode is perhaps a little uninspiring.
To emphasis the oddness in the tone of the campaign, you can currently buy the game and prior expansions at All or None Games’ online store. This means the question is: do you buy from the store now, or do you pledge and get the game later, albeit with the new expansion and at a possible discount (but remember VAT and delivery costs). It really would have helped if we were actually told what Wild Oceans’ new features are in detail! Then again, maybe the thing to do is treat this as an ad for Hidden Ark. Are they allowed to do that and still call it crowdfunding?
Coincidentally, another crowdfunded expansion for a game based on marine exploration also caught my eye recently: Endeavor Deep Sea: Uncharted Waters. In both cases, the campaign’s is the expansion, but most of the description relates to the base game, and it doesn’t appear that there have been any updates to the already pretty good base game since the last time it was published.
The big question for me is: since I don’t have space for both (either on my shelves or my wallet), which do I pick…? Or do I go retail?
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
