Survive! (board game) - simple and loads of fun
This game was released in 1982 and given the amount of board games that my family managed to acquire in the 80's I am dumbfounded that I never heard of this game until yesterday.
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Unlike a lot of the games we play on the game nights at the local pub, this one is very easy to understand and can be picked up almost immediately. The set-up is simple, a bunch of tiles are placed face down in the center of the board face-down in random locations: There are sand, jungle, and mountain tiles. Then the players decide where to put their humans and being close to the shore is obviously advantageous because the objective is to get them off the island to the outer edges of the board.
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Boats are placed (wherever you want) and are controlled by anyone who boards them unless one player has more people than another player at which point majority rules.
There are many dangers on the board: Sharks (attack swimmers but cannot harm boats), Whales (destroy boats but not swimmers), and dragons (destroy everything but have very limited movement.)
our game, a few moves in
The thing that makes this game fun is that anyone can help anyone, and anyone can harm anyone else intentionally. Obviously you don't want to help other players to win but you also have to be careful how much you go after another player because they may decide to "return the favor" later.... which is precisely what happened to me. She destroyed my boat that had 2 of my dudes on it and I spent the rest of the game focusing almost exclusively on preventing her (and only her) from getting anyone to shore - at one point I destroyed a boat that I had a person on simply because she had 2 people on it.
Also your little people have a point value on the bottom of them, so it is important to focus on your high value players rather than just any of them. Of course you need to remember which is which, and this can be quite complicated on its own. In the first game I had dramatically more units that made it to shore, but none of them were high-value so I still didn't win.
After each movement a player will flip a tile and this creates new dangers such as another shark and sometimes it will make a new boat. The tiles are removed at random but you must start with sand, then jungle, and finally the mountain pieces are removed. One of the mountain pieces has a volcano on it and.....
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TL;DR
Survive is an easy to understand game that almost anyone can pick up in just a few minutes and it is loads of fun. There is a lot of strategy but this game can also be played in just a random way and still be fun. Unlike a lot of the games that are played at these nerd cafes, this one was simple yet a lot of fun. I am looking forward to playing it again. This game is playable for free online but since nothing is really free, you are required to sign up and log-in to do so.
Man I miss board games, and general human interaction. I watched this short program about how tech/phones are taking over the UK and honestly the younger generation are staring at a screen for like 5-7 hours a day, or more. They just all sit and stare at a screen. Anyways, as usual I side track from your post, but it made me think about how cool it was back in the day when we used to have to interact with each other haha. But... I do love me some technology though!
Yeah. It all began with Nintendo. Thankfully my parents restricted my gameplay until it was dark and made me go outside. I spend too much time starting at a screen so yeah... I love these board game cafes.
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Yep! I have been drawing more and playing more guitar recently. I spend way to much time staring at a screen. How knows what the long term effects of this are... I guess these millennials will be the guinea pigs and we will find out in 30 years!
"Well anyone can help anyone, and anyone can harm anyone" doesn't this game depict how life is? I think to me with everything you said about this game, I quite understand the concept but more so, it's playable online too
I've never seen this game before either, but it is pretty awesome. It does look like it is pretty simple to play while still having some complexities that make it unpredictable. The team aspect is pretty cool too. A couple of my favorite board games when I was younger were "Payday" and "Stock Market". With the first one the board was setup as a calendar and you basically paid bills and earned money through the month. The second one was just basically like playing the stock market. There was a slider that went up and down and there were about 20 stocks you could buy or sell shares of.
This sounds really fun... I'll add it to my bucket list and see if I can find it before years end
Good review - that looks like a really fun game.
If it's an 80s game (and I'd not heard of it either) then I guess it is a fore-runner of a lot of games where landscape tiles are flipped. Made me think of Mage Knight (flipping hexagonal landscape tiles) and Forbidden Island (sinking island).
Will look out for it.
Never seen this game before but i seem to like the concept. I'll get the game. @gooddream, thanks for the eye opener