Book Club October 2025*
What you need to play:
- The Exclusion Zone Botanist source material
- Two d6 (one light, one dark)
- One token
- Pen and paper/text editor/voice recorder
- Colored pencil/markers for plant drawings
- Exclusion Zone map (PDF link)
I am catching up on previous book club reviews, and Exclusion Zone Botanist (EZB) was our October pick for 2025. This was the second book club pick and the first hex crawl solo that our group played. EZB is from Exeunt Press, the same publisher as Tollund, and plays nicely without too many gotchas. EZB is fun because it has a drawing component to the game. I enjoyed the mechanism for creating different plants, and I'm excited about the upcoming Epsilon expansion, which adds a new map. Your goal is to go through a portal to the Exclusion Zone and document as many plants as you can before the environment corrupts you and you can't get back out. There are visual examples for the size of plants/number of leaves/various shapes that make it easy to create your plant guide, and the prompts give you enough information to create a solid narrative.
Exeunt Press solos have a simple playthrough loop for most of their games, and I really appreciate it. EZB is no exception, each session has a loop of four steps where you look for new plants, check for corruption, move to a new location, and begin the next hour of you excursion. Each hour that you are in the Excursion Zone will increase the risk value of your journey, making it that much harder to collect plant information. We were fairly split on whether we made it out of the zone before being corrupted. I was one of the unfortunate few who ended up corrupted and stuck in the Exclusion Zone. One of the last plants that I detailed involved spores that infected my person and rooted me to the zone, just within sight of the exit portal. It was tragic.
EZB keeps track of the time spent in the zone, so I started my game at 8am and lasted sixteen hours before the corruption caught up with me. I discovered six new plant types, including the final tree with white bark and tendrils that rooted me to the ground. I had a lot of fun making up scientific names for the plants I found and the various bits of corruption that came along with those discoveries. My favorite was the tacet crepitus folium that looked like a peacock feather and shot its seed pods into the environment with a mighty explosion, this one almost took me out, but I hid behind a rock just in time.
Book club enjoyed this one a lot. We all brought our plant illustrations with us and had a show and tell. It was a lot of fun to see how everyone interpreted the drawing instructions and to see what we all came up with. Book club has some fantastically creative folks, so the drawings were a lot of fun to go through. Like I wrote earlier, we were fairly mixed in whether or not we made it back out of the zone, so it was a lot of fun to see both sides of that story. Since we were all fairly new to book club, and to solos, we all agreed that the Risk Value Tracker was a little confusing, but we all managed to figure it out. I tend to try to make things harder than they need to be, and I definitely do this with solos.
Final thoughts: This is a great game for folks who want to try a solo that has less journaling and more movement. The drawing component added a fun additional piece to the game, and I am hoping that we can get more art solos to the table. I would take the time to print out or draw a hex map for the zone and I would reorient myself with the risk value tables before I played again, but this is a solo that you could play multiple times and still enjoy the journey.
Would you make it out of the zone?
*This review was published a year after the book club event. I'm playing a little catchup.