Civilization: A New Dawn – Terra Incognita

The trouble starts with the box. For an expensive expansion, the supplied tray does not properly hold its contents. The components are excellent; the storage solution appears to have been conceived as a mild punishment. Classic FFG: handsome production, gaps in the rules, and carelessness precisely where care was required.

Terra Incognita works within Civilization: A New Dawn's established framework, adding material without substantially changing how that framework operates. That is the difficulty. The original design is so firmly locked into its own structure that there is only limited room for an expansion to broaden it, let alone remake it.

The new ideas are there, and some of them are genuinely strong. They give players more to handle within that abstract framework, but the friction between them still travels through the same awkward system. The game remains busy, abstract and, where it matters, broken. It has new furniture in a room whose floor was already crooked.

If your group already loves New Dawn, Terra Incognita will probably go down very well, because it supplies more of what that group already wants. If you wanted the expansion to solve the base game's drama, it has neither the ambition nor the leverage. For me, Terra Incognita does not save Civilization: A New Dawn; it merely makes it larger in the same, rather disappointing fashion.