Playing this on the heels of Sands of Al-Kalim was a bit of a disappointment but it should not have been. This is a rather nice expansion as well. It just doesn’t change the game quite as much as Sands.

The first big difference from the base game is a gorgeous, gorgeous new map with islands connected by sea routes between towns. The routes are interrupted with sea encounters that replace the blue encounters present in the base game. The green, yellow, and red encounters have new decks and occur on designated land locations, just as in the base game. In addition, there is a deck of silver encounters. These occur on the Island of Dread, for which there is a separate tile set off to the side of the main board. The goal of the game is to find this island and defeat the evil god there, drawing and defeating the silver challenges until you draw and defeat him.

The biggest change in this expansion by far is sea travel. There aren’t enough encounters on a single island to keep everyone busy for long, so you’ll soon be wanting to voyage on to greener pastures. There is now a new deck of captains. In order to travel by sea, you must hire a captain at the market of the town from which you are departing. Captains vary in cost and have special abilities. They act like an ally but don’t count against your ally limit. However, if your captain dies in battle with a sea encounter (or the hero does) you will be shipwrecked and the player on your left will choose an adjacent land space. You’ll lose your gold and most valuable item just as in the base game when you are knocked out. You don’t roll movement dice to travel by sea; instead you just move to the next sea encounter space (or town), draw the encounter card and resolve it. When you do reach a town, your captain immediately goes back into the market stack. You can never have more than one captain and it you don’t set out to sea on the next turn after hiring one, you lose him. Also, if you don’t have the money, you can still get a captain and head out to sea, you just don’t get any of the rewards or experience for defeating sea encounters for that voyage.

Another big addition to this game is the map tiles. Map tiles are used in matched sets of one green and one blue tile. You’ll earn these by defeating sea encounters as well as in a few other places during the game. You’ll draw them form a facedown pile, so you can’t depend on always getting a set. Sets are discarded during your experience step while voyaging to do one of two things. You can discard a set to “discover” the Island of Dread” and take on the final challenge. I don’t recommend this until you are leveled up and good and ready, however. More often, you’ll be discarding a set to find a legendary item. There are eight of these, all different, that you can choose from as long as they are still available. These each have a unique, powerful ability that you can use at the appropriate time by discarding the item and placing it back into the pool to be found again. These marvelous abilities include things like automatically winning combat rolls of certain types, starting the combat phase of an encounter in any phase you like, having fatigue dealt to you instead of health in a round, replenishing encounters on the board, etc. It is strongly advised to get a few of these items to help defeat some of the harder sea encounters before you have leveled up and before you take on the final challenge.

There is one final change in this expansion although it is not quite so dramatic. These are tiles that are placed on the board due to an event that is drawn. They include things such as turning sea encounter locations into regular sea channels, making it easier to travel, or causing several cities to sink into the sea and disappear.

Finally, there are eight new characters to use in the expansion or the base game.

While this expansion did not change the game as radically as the Sands the Al-Kalim, it still provides a nice change of pace from the base game and I really enjoyed it.