Expeditions (video game series)

Lore & Background

The Expeditions series began as a university project that became a game demo for a target audience of one person. That demo was turned into Conquistador Mobile, a gamebook-style strategy adventure game for Windows Phone 7 released in April 2012. The developers then built Expeditions: Conquistador from scratch as a turn-based 3D role-playing game starting in April 2012, with BitComposer releasing it on May 30, 2013. The game was partially funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $77,247 against a $70,000 goal.

Expeditions: Conquistador is set in an alternate history during the Age of Discovery, where the player leads a Spanish conquistador expedition to Hispaniola and Mexico from 1518 to 1520. The player character has five non-combat stats (tactics, diplomacy, healing, hunting, leadership) that do not level up but can be modified by events and squad bonuses. The game features turn-based combat on a hex grid, resource management, and text-driven quests with branching storylines. The developers cited King's Bounty, Heroes of Might and Magic, Fallout, Dungeons & Dragons, Rainbow Six, and X-COM as inspirations.

Logic Artists later released two further Expeditions games: Expeditions: Viking in 2017 and Expeditions: Rome in 2022. THQ Nordic acquired the Expeditions Series intellectual property in November 2018.

Reader's Guide

The Expeditions series is significant for its focus on historical settings with alternate history elements, allowing player choices to diverge from actual events. The first game, Expeditions: Conquistador, received generally favorable reviews on Metacritic, with praise for its writing and battle system but criticism for its difficulty, particularly at the start. The series demonstrates a niche approach to tactical RPGs by emphasizing exploration as both a mechanical and narrative theme, a design choice the developers made because the Spanish conquest of the Americas was underused in video games. The series also shows the viability of Kickstarter funding for historical strategy games, as the first game raised funds exceeding its goal. The acquisition by THQ Nordic in 2018 indicates continued commercial interest in the franchise. The series' legacy includes two sequels that expanded the historical scope to Viking and Roman settings, maintaining the core squad-based tactical gameplay established in the first title.

Did You Know?

• Expeditions: Conquistador was partially funded by a Kickstarter campaign that raised $77,247, exceeding its $70,000 goal.
• The game is based on a university project where the task was to create a game demo for a target audience of one person.
• The developers chose the Spanish perspective because it seemed more exciting, philosophically complex, and fresher than the English perspective.
• THQ Nordic acquired the Expeditions Series intellectual property in November 2018.