Papua

About this board game

Papua is a board game for 2–4 players, played in about 75 minutes, in which players lead scientific expeditions through Papua New Guinea during the late years of the nineteenth century.

Each player manages a team of scientists and assigns them to crucial expedition tasks. Build relationships with the natives to gain their help, secure funding, gather food, and recruit more scientists while working to collect remarkable discoveries.

Players roll dice and allocate the results across different areas of the board. Majorities usually determine who benefits from each area, creating competition for the resources and opportunities needed to keep an expedition running.

• Huts: cultivate relationships with the natives.
• Logistics: help keep the expedition supplied.
• Expeditions: compete for new discoveries through secret bidding.
• Funding: gather money to support further exploration.
• Hunting and fishing: collect food for the crew.
• Field notebook: discover new scoring opportunities.

The most important contest takes place in the expeditions zone, where players secretly bid for discoveries of plants, animals, and even native tribes. These discoveries become the foundation of each player’s final score.

At the end of the game, players score sets collected from the discovery zone. The player with the highest prestige is remembered as the expedition leader who made the most significant contribution. Papua was released in 2018 and received a Dice Tower Seal of Approval.