Renowned Explorers: International Society

Most tactics games offer one answer to every problem: reduce the other side’s health bar to zero. Renowned Explorers: International Society asks a better question. What if you could win a fight by being so charming that the enemy simply gives up?

Developed by Abbey Games and released on Steam in September 2015 for $19.99, this is a strategic rogue-like adventure set in a light-hearted, fictional 19th century, a world of pith helmets and museum rivalries played for comedy rather than conquest. You assemble a three-person expedition: one captain and two crew, drawn from a roster of scientists, fighters, scouts and speakers. Then you set out to become the world’s most renowned explorer by out-discovering your rivals. That goal matters. You aren’t saving the world. You’re chasing prestige, and the game’s whole economy bends around that vanity.

Each campaign strings together a series of expeditions to Caribbean islands, Hungarian mines and Egyptian tombs. You move node by node across a map with limited supplies, resolve story events through skill checks, and collect treasures. When conversation fails, or when you choose to let it fail, encounters shift to a turn-based hex grid.

The game sits in an interesting gap in the market. It’s lighter and faster than the heavyweight tactics games, more mechanical than a narrative adventure, and far more cheerful than the grim roguelikes that dominate the genre. That positioning gives it a clear identity: a small game with one very good idea, executed with discipline — along with a few rough edges.

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and it earns its place in any strategy library that has room for something that doesn’t take itself seriously.

• Attitude-Based Encounters: Every conflict can be won through aggressive, friendly or devious approaches. The mood between the two sides shifts how effective each one is, so the tone of a fight becomes a resource you manage.
• Crew Composition: One captain and two crew members chosen from scientists, fighters, scouts and speakers, each with distinct skills and personality. Your trio determines which problems you can solve and which you have to dodge.
• Node-Based Expeditions: Maps are travelled one node at a time on a limited supply budget, which forces real choices about which discoveries to chase and which to leave behind.
• Skill-Check Story Events: Written events resolve against your crew’s abilities, so a team of academics reads a tomb very differently from a team of brawlers.
• Three-Currency Meta-Layer: Between expeditions you spend gold, research and status on gear, upgrades and an entourage of supporters.
• Randomized Campaigns: Locations, events and rewards are shuffled each run, so no two campaigns unfold the same way.

The Mood System Is the Whole Game

The headline mechanic deserves the attention it gets. In most tactics games, “non-lethal options” are a reskin: the same damage numbers under a different animation. Here, the three approaches form a real strategic layer. Attack someone and the encounter turns hostile. Encourage and flatter and it warms up. Taunt and deceive and it sours in a different direction. The mood between the two sides then modifies how well each approach works, so every action has a second-order effect on every action after it.

In practice, you are playing two games at once. One is the familiar spatial puzzle of hex positioning, range and turn order. The other is a running negotiation about the emotional temperature of the room. A crew of speakers can talk an enemy into surrender, but only if you’ve steered the mood somewhere their words land. A fighter can bludgeon through, but doing so can poison the atmosphere for your friendlier teammates. Mixed crews create friction with themselves, and that friction is the most interesting design decision in the game.

It also gives the comedy mechanical weight. Insulting an opponent into giving up is a legitimate build with real trade-offs.

The Expedition Loop

Outside of encounters, the loop is tight. Each expedition is a small map of nodes, and each step consumes supplies. You can’t see everything. That scarcity turns the map into a routing problem: is the treasure three nodes off the path worth arriving at the finale with nothing in reserve? The game never lets you feel comfortable, and the supply cap keeps individual expeditions brisk.

Story events fill the gaps between fights. These are short written vignettes resolved through skill checks, and they’re where crew selection pays off or backfires. The writing is the game’s second great asset: witty and quick, and it doesn’t linger. It trusts you to get the joke and move on.

There’s a flaw here, though. Skill checks are probabilistic, and probability doesn’t care about your planning. A failed roll on a check you were favored to pass can cost resources you budgeted carefully. That randomness in events and skill checks is a fair complaint, half of it anyway. Risk is the point of an expedition game. But when a single bad roll cascades across a whole campaign, the result feels less like a consequence of your choices and more like a coin landing wrong.

Progression and the Meta-Layer

Between expeditions, you convert your haul into power. Gold buys gear. Research funds upgrades. Status recruits an entourage of supporters. Three currencies sounds like bloat, but the split works. Different treasures and events feed different currencies, so your spending strategy grows out of what your crew is good at finding. A scholarly team builds one kind of engine and a charismatic team builds another.

This is where the roguelike structure pays off. Because locations, events and rewards are randomized, you can’t follow a fixed build order. You adapt to what the run gives you.

Where It Wears Thin

Randomization has limits. The expedition destinations themselves are a finite set, and after enough runs you’ll know them. Repetition sets in once the maps become familiar, and no shuffle of events fully hides that. The crew roster carries much of the replay value, since new trios change how you approach old places, but the places remain old.

The endgame is the other pressure point. The final stretch can feel punishing on higher difficulties, a spike that tests whether your build was coherent from the first expedition. For players who planned well, that’s a satisfying exam. For players who improvised, a multi-hour campaign can end abruptly, and the game does little beforehand to warn you that you’re underprepared.

The art direction matches the tone: bright, storybook illustration with expressive character designs that sell each explorer’s personality before you’ve read their skill sheet. The charming art style does real functional work. In a game where encounters hinge on mood, readable expressions and clear visual feedback about the emotional state of the field matter.

The interface carries a heavy load. It has to surface hex positions, three attitude types, the current mood, skill-check odds, supplies and three currencies. It manages mostly through consistent color-coding and iconography. New players should still expect onboarding friction, because the mood system is unlike anything else in the genre and takes a few encounters to internalize.

On the technical side, this is a 2D, turn-based game with modest demands. Nothing in its design stresses hardware, and its presentation suits the low-spec laptops where a lot of strategy gaming happens.

On Steam, the game supports Windows, macOS and Linux. Native support for all three is welcome and remains less common than it should be for a tactics title.

This is a mouse-first design. Node selection, hex targeting and menu-heavy shopping between expeditions all favor a cursor, and the turn-based pacing means there’s no penalty for playing on a trackpad. The structure also fits short sessions: an expedition is a contained chunk of play, and a campaign breaks naturally between them. It suits a weeknight hour as well as a weekend binge.

Renowned Explorers: International Society succeeds because its central idea is structural. The attitude system reshapes how you build a crew, how you read a battlefield and how you think about winning. Strip it out and you’d have a pleasant, competent expedition roguelike. With it, you have one of the more original tactics designs of its era, wrapped in writing that’s funnier than strategy games usually bother to be.

The flaws are real. The maps repeat, the dice occasionally betray good planning, and the late-game difficulty spike punishes sloppy builds without much warning. These are the costs of a small studio building a tightly scoped game around randomization, and they surface mostly in extended play rather than in a first campaign.

Abbey Games made a game about vain adventurers competing for applause, and its best trick is that a well-timed compliment can win a fight. We recommend it to tactics players who want something lighter, funnier and structurally different — with the caveat that its repetition and dice-driven swings will wear on some.