Base price: $45.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 60 – 75 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 3
Full disclosure: A review copy of The Search for Lost Species was provided by Renegade Game Studios.
I should probably pack for BGG.CON. I’ve been awful about packing for the longest time, and this ends up being an ongoing tradition, but sometimes I just get in the zone for reviewing games and I want to write instead of whatever else I was doing. This is another one of those times. Strike while the hay’s hot and make iron while the sun shines or whatever. I’m pretty sure those are right. I’m going to have quite a few reviews coming out of that experience anyways, since, you know, new games to try and all that, but in the meantime, let’s talk about a game I got to play relatively recently: The Search for Lost Species! As you might know, The Search for Planet X is a favorite of mine (I love deduction games), so a follow-up game was a delightful surprise and I’ve been pretty excited to try it. Also, they just found one of the lost species featured in the game, so that’s pretty cool. Let’s see how it plays!
In The Search for Lost Species, players take on the role of scientists on an expedition to find potentially lost species in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Naturally, they’re lost for a reason, so you’ll have to use logic and deduction to figure out where they’re hiding based on their impact on the ecosystem. Here, that means using the app to pinpoint where other species are and using the process of elimination and those species’ rules to determine where the Lost Species must be. You’ll move around the map each turn and spend “time” to perform certain actions, additionally making predictions when you think you know what species is on a specific spot. Just be careful! Doing that can let the entire table know what species is there. While science is at its best when it’s collaborative, you’d rather be the scientist who makes the discovery, you know? When you need to take a break, head to town to do some research and learn new rules for how the species interact, and get some help from the local townspeople in your search! There’s a lot to learn and a lot to discover, so get out there and start searching! Will you be able to find the Lost Species in time?
Overall: 7.75 / 10
Overall, I think The Search for Lost Species is pretty fun! It does some things that I like over The Search for Planet X, both in terms of presentation and structure, and it has some drawbacks that I’m a bit surprised by. I think it’s hard to recapture the lightning in the bottle that was the original The Search for Planet X, but this is a worthy sophomore attempt. See, instead of having players circle the night sky and having part of the night sky be unavailable in Lost Species (as was the case in Planet X), they structure the board as an island that players search for the particular Lost Species. This makes more sense structurally, which is good! It does make evaluating predictions a bit less finicky, as well. In Planet X, you’d move predictions closer and closer to the enter before evaluating them, which was a tiny bit clunky; you needed to remember to move them every time it came up. Lost Species, instead, allows you to just leave predictions on the board and they pop when their number comes up. I, in general, like the translation to searching for a lost species in the game; thematically, it makes sense and having multiple different options for species you could look for gives you ways to shake up the game (something I wanted for Planet X).
Not everything stuck the landing, though: while I think that the Visit a Town task is interesting (in that you can do Research there and then you’re blocked from Visiting a Town for some length of the game), the actual Town Cards are odd. They can give players boosts to their abilities or their scores which makes the game feel a bit swingy. I’d honestly just as soon do without them; it feels like they were meant to make the Research action feel stronger (especially in games where some Research is essentially useless / vacuously true), but they just end up making players feel like they would have done better if they had gotten a better card. Plus, as is the case with random markets, there’s no real way to refresh it if nobody wants any of the cards in there, so the Town Cards can feel like they’re stale. Then, you can imagine a player’s frustration when they have to take a card they don’t want and the next card revealed is “better”. Adding that extra feature also puts more information in the rulebook, which, at 28 pages, doesn’t really need more content. The translation from space to Earth also adds in something that I particularly didn’t like, which is compass directions. You might get told that the Lost Species is never northeast of a toad, for instance; compass directions aren’t everyone’s thing, and that can cause some needless confusion.
This is all to say that I think The Search for Lost Species is a bit of a mixed bag as a successor to The Search for Planet X. I enjoy the game quite a bit, but I’m not sure the added complexity and changes necessarily elevate Lost Species over Planet X, for me. They’re different enough that I think there’s room to have both in a collection, especially for fans of the deduction genre, but I’d almost like to see some of these features incorporated back into Planet X in a Second Edition or something to change up how you look for planets or to give players more modular logic puzzles. Could be interesting! In the meantime, I’ll likely still play Lost Species, but I’m not sure it’ll hit the same highs for me as Planet X did. I do enjoy the art and the real-life implications of these searches, though! I think that’s a nice way to ground the game as important and let players know that this kind of work is real, it’s ongoing, and it matters. Never gonna pass up a cool theme. If you’re a die-hard fan of The Search for Planet X, you’re looking for a game of animal-based deduction, or you just want to see if you can find all the toads in a game, you might enjoy The Search for Lost Species! It was a neat experience.
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