My wife and I have been playing this game for about a year now and now the initial hype has settled and we've done 3 playthroughs (1x Voracious Goddess, 1x An Offering to the Guardians and 1x the Icy Maze), I think I've got a fair grasp of this game and what it could offer.
It's the first time for me to write a board game review, so forgive me for being a bit too long-winded.
Theme:
You and your party members return to a mysterious 7th continent that you previously explored to lift a curse you happened to trigger by your initial visit. As you re-explore the continent, you'll stumble across remnants from your previous expedition, ruins from an ancient civilization, weird animals (and familiar ones) and an occasional indiginous hermit.
During your expedition you'll be confronted with unexpected obstacles/challenges which you'll need to overcome, risking injury or even death. Thankfully, you'll be able to craft items, unearth hidden treasures or hunt for food to aid you in your quest.
The gameplay matches the theme quite nicely, but as the game is designed to last 20-30 or so hours for a single playthrough, it's easy to forget the main quests as you explore the continent itself.
Rules:
Rules are fairly simple, although we initially misunderstood some rules (like how the '7's work) and some things are easy to forget (like also getting a Paranoia card when an action fails).
Each action requires a number of successes and a minimal amount of cards to be drawn from the action deck. Items you've crafted (or found) allow you to having to draw fewer cards in order to get the successes you need.
Difficulty:
If you run out of cards from your action deck and are forced to draw cards from your discard pile, the game ends if you draw a curse card. There are also certain events or obstacles that result in death if you fail.
Running out of cards in the action deck can become a problem on your first playthrough, because you need to find food in order to be able to reshuffle some of the discarded cards back into the action deck and on your first playthrough you have no idea where to find such sources of food. On later playthroughs you'll revisit familiar areas and know where to find food, making it easier to plan ahead.
You can ramp up the difficulty by combining curses. 558
Although combining curses do not unlock new content, you're more likely to burn through your action deck before you're able to solve all curses as revisiting previously used hunting/fishing throves are less rewarding than the first time you visited those throves. However it's not very difficult to continiously find food in hunting throves you've already been before, it just requires a bit more planning (risking spending more cards on finding food than the food would allow you to replenish, if you found food at all, so you'll need to gear up with items beforehand in order to get the best result).
And there is an easy mode (granting you a 2nd life once you depleted your action deck and have drawn a curse card from the discard pile) and a hard mode, to make the game easier or more difficult.
Playing with more people doesn't make the game easier, because the more people you play with, the less items each player can have (for instance, with 2 players, each player can have 3 stacks of 3 combined items, while with 4 players, each player can only have 2 stacks of 2 combined items).
Exploration:
This game is mostly about exploration and the first time we've played the Voracious Goddess we were very excited about every point of interest the game had to offer. Due to having taken a wrong turn somewhere we ended up seeing most of the main island, although that wasn't necessary if we followed the quest's hints more closely. After many sessions we finally reached our destination only to find out we didn't yet fullfill the requirements to finish the quest, so we had to backtrack alot in order to find what we needed. When we thought we had everything we needed, we ventured back to the quest-destination only to find out we still did not fullfill the requirements, after which we gave up, being starved and exhausted most hunting/fishing spots and not wanting to backtrack dozens of tiles again.
Some action cards allow you to discover new things about the continent, like the knowledge that a certain plant you keep coming across really helps you with something, which is neat, making you look twice or thrice at a given terrain you've already visited several times to see if you recognize something that could be of help. There are dozens of these knowledge-things to discover and after 3 playthroughs we might only have seen a third of these.
Same goes for unearthing treasure. Sometimes you'll find a treasure map, or stumble upon a hidden throve and find something neat. 884