Explorers of the Woodlands is a light family-friendly fully cooperative dungeon crawler where the 1-4 players are turning over and placing out tiles to explore the woods. All the while, you're encountering monsters and collecting treasure, and building up to a boss fight that's revealed when you get to the bottom of the stack of tiles.
The attractive cute woodland animal art from Jiahui Eva Gao is reminiscent of the artwork in Root (Leder Games). Geoffrey Wood's design makes for intuitively straightforward game play. You draw and lay out tiles and these mostly spawn monsters and/or treasure, or event cards that could be good or bad. On your turn, you roll four standard six-sided dice and allocate them to the four actions on your individual board. For all characters, you can move if you allocate a die roll of 1-3 and you can generate an 'orb' if you allocate 4-6. Orbs can be used on subsequent turns to re-roll dice in combat or to trigger a character's special ability. Each character also has two unique additional tracks on which they can allocate their die rolls.
Combat ensues when you encounter a monster. The monster tile will indicate the number you need to roll to defeat the monster as well as the number of hit points of damage the monster will dish out. You can expect a reward for defeating a monster but there may also be a penalty if the monster wins...
We describe the gameplay as intuitive and that's handy as the game is let down somewhat by its rulebook. There are several icons used in the game and we'd have welcomed a clearer guide to decode these. Tho' it wasn't included in the box in our copy, happily the publishers, From The Woods Studio, have uploaded a player aid to BoardGameGeek. Tho' Explorers of the Woodlands is a great way of introducing younger players to dungeon crawlers, it's a pity that the player boards are only single layer, so cubes placed out to track your health and orbs can be all too easily jogged during the course of all the dice rolling. The rules suggest ages 10+ but with our caveat about the danger of jogging your trackers, and with player aids downloaded, this is a game that can be played and enjoyed by children from 7 or 8 and up.