Exploration in games isn’t anything new. It’s one of the 4 pillars in 4X games. A lot of themes are centered around exploring old ruins, or discovering a region around you. Usually it involves flipping over some tile to reveal some terrain, or going to a token on a map to resolve an event of some kind. The 7th Continent is a game that puts the players into the roles of renown explorers of the last terra incognita; The explorers to remove the last “Here Be Dragons” on the global map.

The good news: You’ve already been a part of the expedition that discovered The 7th Continent.

The bad news: You’ve been cursed, and like Jack and Kate, you’ve got to go back to the island. (Oh, 10-Year-Old spoilers for Lost.)

You’ve been suffering from fevered dreams and sickly awakenings, but you are able to jot down some sort of clue to help. Back to the land of discovery you go: What do you find when you show up? Well to answer that would rob you of the experience of exploration, and ruin the purpose of the game.

The 7th Continent is full of some of the most unique experiences I’ve had in a board game. It’s a game designed with the inspiration of the Fighting Fantasy Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel series by Steve Jackson (No, not that one) and Ian Livingstone. But I think comparing it to those books could put misplaced expectations with this game. While many may debate the merits of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure as a game, no mistake could be made with 7th Continent. It captures the imagination from those books, but it presents that imagination through clever use of the artwork which works in tandem of the gameplay.

The game has an unstructured turn order, letting players to take turns in any order, even allowing a player to take as many turns in a row they’d like, just as long as the other players agree to it. Giving a great chance for a game to emulate the awkwardness of having everyone stare at a wall of games, trying to decide what to play next. But this disappears very quickly as soon as the game gets underway and players are collectively eager to discover the next thing, like a former paraplegic, obsessing over what’s inside the hatch, you’ll feel compelled to check out graves, ruins and other exotic offerings the continent has to offer, never letting people tell you what you can’t do.

The game centers around performing actions, which takes time (paid for through discarding skill cards from the draw pile) and achieving a threshold of successes by using a combination of skills, items and a bit of hedging your bets. The list of actions is enormous, but they all resolve similarly. This makes a good anticipation of what type of action you’ll be doing, while not over-complicating the system. It also all ties in together with your life force. The draw pile is the party’s collective vitality. As long as you have cards to draw, you have the strength to not succumb to the effects of the curse. When you run out, you’ll start taking cards randomly from the discard pile instead, draw a formidable skull, and the curse strikes, allowing The 7th Continent to claim the expedition party as trophies. More than any other cooperative game I’ve played, the moments and successes this game has provided has enabled me to slap many fives, because we were able to find a much needed food source, or digging up treasure by using our own wits.

But to appreciate the good, you need to experience the bad. And failing any test burns. More so when you fail together. When taking an action as a group, you determine the person who is leading that action. The game offers variety at every chance it gets, except when it comes to failing in a group. Like a crazed narcissist, failure at a skill test with another member will result in the leader becoming paranoid, blaming the failure that another member didn’t pull their own weight. This is by far, the least compelling aspect I’ve come across in this massive game, that is rich in variety. Why just paranoid? What about shame? Regret? Anxiety? I feel those emotions way more often than paranoia.

Even with success, sometimes things just don’t go the way you hoped. As success isn’t often succeeding at what you wanted to do, but you succeed simply not dying. Either way, you’ll be receiving different status effects, like paranoia, bloody, or many others. And if you’re unable to patch up these statuses, you can can trigger a quick degradation of your life pool, as skill cards cycle out of their draw pile and into the discard pile. When you are holding several of these statuses, you’ll be nervous about doing anything perceptively dangerous, knowing that discard pile will engorge on you like a leech that won’t let go.

The brilliant artwork in the game isn’t just to help set the setting, but it is absolutely integrated with the mechanisms of the game. An event might present a choice to be made: a seemingly random 50/50 probability, but upon careful observation of the artwork itself, you can actually discover the solution. Or with clever use of well hidden secret numbers embedded into the artwork, you’ll stumble across something enriching to the experience that is directly related to the very location you spot that secret number. These moments are so rewarding, as it doesn’t feel like you just got lucky, but that you outwitted, outplayed, and outlasted the encounter.

Today, so many games are released. Good games aren’t enough. Great games need to stand out in some way. Designers need to risk the unusual, or they’ll end up with just being the ordinary. The 7th Continent risks being repetitive, gimmicky, unhinged, solitary, and overwrought and it paid out. The 7th Continent isn’t just a game about exploration, it is a gaming milestone for how exploration should be done. Most games confuse exploration for adventure, and the 7th Continent conflates them, and it is the epitome of exploration.