This weekend I played two new board games at Andrew's place. Sky already posted about one of them (Cave Troll) so I'm going to discuss the second one (Red November).
Red November is a cooperative game with a really cool theme. You're a group of gnomes manning an experimental submarine that hits a bit of a rocky patch. Help is on the way but you need to survive long enough to get saved. There are a lot of different ways for the ship to explode or for an individual gnome to die and it's apparently quite difficult which is good for a cooperative game. It uses the great 'time' mechanic where each turn takes a different length of time and you move forward on a turn order track based on how long your turn took. (Time here meaning in game time where walking takes time and not 'we need to chess clock Robb' time.) Thebes and Olympos use a similar mechanic and I really like it.
We ran into a number of rules questions that we didn't quite know how to answer so I turned to the internet today to find out more...
The first thing I found is that apparently the game designer and the publisher have had different ideas for how to resolve some rules questions. (Reminds me of Stone Age scoring...) For the most part it would seem you can find an official backing for going either way on most of our rules questions which is a little disappointing. I want to know the _one_ right way to play!
Apparently the publisher (Fantasy Flight Games) has put out a revised rule book on their website and I think they've even printed a second edition of the game with the new rule book so for now I'm going to take it as the authority on the subject...
First of all you can only have one of any given timed disaster at once. During the game we played we had the missile problem happen twice, twice. The first time we barely disarmed both missiles but the second time coincided with a fire in the same room and several other problems (the ship was running out of air, the Kraken was attacking, and Andrew was on our team) and we ended up exploding. You just ignore the second missile strike if the first one is already in progress.
A minor point but it would seem if you fix a critical error with a machine that could also fix one of the disaster tracks you actually get to do both at once which makes things a little easier.
You can't block the exits from the ship.
There's a rules change such that if you open a door between high water and low water you end up with two rooms at low water.
The rules now clarify that items should be face up and public unless you're playing with a variant where you get to murder your friends with crowbars.
If you're outside the ship (thanks to the aqualung) and you're beyond the 10 minute mark you can abandon comrades even if you should otherwise die.
That last one adds a level of paranoia and team breaking that makes a game like this interesting but not really fun. The rule is that if you're close to the end of the game AND you have a specific item (there are 2 copies total in a deck of 48 items) you can abandon ship. Successfully taking this action means your winning condition is reversed so if the ship explodes you win and if they manage to pull it out you lose. There are a couple problems I have with this rule.
The first is it can really reduce the chances of the other players to pull off an exciting end game victory. In the game we played if we all worked together we were going to need a couple unlikely rolls to pull off the win. We were probably in the 10% range of winning if we worked together. Instead Andrew had one of the items and decided to try to split. He took an action which drastically reduced our odds of winning by flooding a critical room instead of fixing the problem he was beside. This meant we had to divert someone else to take a much smaller chance at fixing his problem. He didn't even manage to make it out of the ship so he lost anyway but if he'd found a way to do it then it would have made sense. He'd be trading a 10% chance of a group victory for a 98% chance of a solo victory. Of course he's going to do that! But it isn't terribly fun for anyone else.
The second problem with that rule is it encourages people to farm for items instead of helping to save the ship. If you assume the ship is likely to explode eventually then you want to make other people deal with early problems while you dig through the item deck for an aqualung. Items are good in general so we do want someone digging for items but the person who actually takes those actions has a huge advantage. They get two ways to win while people who actually spend their time fixing problems can only really win if the ship is in fantastic shape at the end. The reason for this is if someone can do some damage on the way off the ship and flip the victory conditions they're going to do so anytime it increases their chances of winning. Heck, I'd probably do it even if it slightly hurt my chances of winning just because it would give me a solo victory! (Or a two-way victory if someone has the second aqualung and followed me!)
Now, maybe if the game is relatively easy I can see the abandon comrades rule making sense. Then when things start falling apart you can pull a rabbit out of your hat and try for the backstab win. But as it is my feeling is that everyone should just dig for an aqualung early and then play the role of a Cylon. Or find some way to get the aqualungs into the hands of people willing to go down with the ship and out of the hands of Andrew, Sky, and I!
I would definitely play it again (and I think it's easier with some of the rules changes in the second edition) but I am reserving judgment on the abandon comrades action.
2 comments:
Bah. Willing to play Red November and not Space Alert?
I would definitely prefer to play Red November over Space Alert but that may be because I've only played RN the once. They may well both become games I don't particularly want to play.
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