Red November
I played a new board game last night that I recommend. It’s a cooperative game: you all are gnomes on a disaster-prone submarine and you need to survive 60 minutes until rescue arrives. The basic mechanic is cool – you each spend a variable number of minutes on your repair tasks. The more minutes you spend, the more likely you are to succeed. But negative events occur every few minutes (fires break out, compartments flood, the reactor overheats, a kraken attacks the sub, etc) so you can’t spend all of your time on one task. It’s impossible to stop all the disasters, so you need to prioritize. You can collect tools which shave time off your repairs or grog to boost your courage.
In our game, my gnome chugged some grog to succeed at unblocking a hatch, but then passed out drunk. Unfortunately, a fire then broke out in his compartment so he died. Then the compartment flooded. But the other gnomes all escaped just before the kraken crushed the burning, mostly-flooded sub whose reactor was overheating. 🙂
Boardgamegeek only gives it 6.5/10 (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36946/red-november) so I’m wondering about its replay value. But the first play was great fun.
I saw that in one of the local game stores, I thought it looked like it had potential. I may have to pick it up.
I played it with some friends and had the same thoughts – fun game on initial play, but if I owned it I’m not sure how many times it would hit the game table regularly…