Saturday Morning Gaming: Unfathomable

There are board games that you play and playing them once or twice is enough to get a feel for what the game does and how it works. Unfathomable is not one of those games. I’ve only played it once and I find myself itching to play it again. Some of that is due to the whole “we didn’t know what we were doing right or wrong or what” thing that sufficiently complex boardgames can do but much of it is because the game is *DEEP*. Seriously, I felt like we hadn’t explored more than a quarter of the game as we wrapped up for the night.

The basic idea behind the game is this: You are a passenger or crew member aboard a ship that is about to have an encounter with some eldritch horrors. After a turn, someone at the table could be in league with the horrors and, after two turns, someone at the table is *DEFINITELY* in league with them. The non-horror players have a goal: Survive and get the boat to port. The horror players have a goal: Mess everything up. And they can do this either secretly while pretending to help or come out and say “I am a bad guy” and have access to new and different ways to mess everything up (while leaving the old secret ways of messing things up behind).

I’ve never played Battlestar Galactica, a game where someone at the table is a secret Cylon, and so I figured that this was a reskinned version of that. A couple of people at the table, however, had played BG before and they told me “oh, this is completely different.”

So it’s got the whole “someone at the table is a traitor” thing like BG had, but everything else is new and fresh.

Let’s take a look at the board:

And with a little more detail:

You pick which passenger or crew member you are.

Every person is unique and has a backstory explaining what they’re doing there and why it’d be plausible that they would be the one who ended up being the traitor. They also each have unique abilities.

Someone at the table is going to be the captain and someone at the table will be the keeper of the tome…

Being the captain means that, whenever there is an opportunity to progress on the journey, they pick two cards from the progress deck and choose one of the two without showing the other to their fellow players.

Being the keeper of the tome means that you can use an action each turn to pick two cards from the spell deck and choose one of the two without showing the other.

Well, the idea behind the game is that you have to travel from here to there and, unfortunately, the monsters from the deep have taken an interest in your ship.

These monsters can attack your ship, do damage to it, and spawn little monsters that can go and attack your characters (and your passengers) personally.

And there are a *LOT* of little monsters.

You go through a turn where everybody is working together to deal with the various awful things happen to the boat and you’re all given obstacles to overcome and then the traitor cards are shuffled and handed out. (There are rules for the number of traitor cards that can potentially be dealt so you’re not going to have to deal with more than two of them. Which, quite honestly, still feels like a lot.)

There are a *TON* of things going wrong on the ship at the same time. You need to keep track of passengers (you don’t have enough), food (you don’t have enough), fuel (you don’t have enough), ship hit points (you don’t have enough), and, at the same time, you need to keep going and manage the major cleansing spell that will push the eldritch horrors back into the deep (but, you know, also kill any passengers who happen to be standing on the deck when it cleanses).

Each of the characters has different things to contribute to the progress you need to make (and, therefore, different things that can throw spanners into the works).

Like, here are some of the things you’ll have to overcome:

Like, Disturbing Dreams requires that you gather up 13 points of Influence and Lore. The various players at the table have the ability to contribute to those 13 points… but every card that isn’t Influence or Lore will count as a minus.

Oh, and two cards are randomly added to this challenge… so maybe they’ll help? Maybe? But they probably won’t. So if you ask “who here at the table added the Strength card?”, you don’t know for a fact that it’s the passenger who gets assigned Strength cards every round. Maybe that card was put in there from the Chaos deck.

My tentative first impression is that there are *WAAAAY* too many traitors in the game. Like, I don’t know that it’d be easy to beat the game if it were a 100% collaborative game. Being able to be one of the saboteurs is probably overkill. That said, that makes it a lot more fun to get dealt the traitor card. Hey, you’ll probably win! But the monsters outside the boat are trying to do damage to it, the passengers are going out of their way to get their fool selves killed, you’re running out of food, you’re running out of fuel, and you’re kind of going nuts.

All in all, it’s an exceptionally fun game… but I think to really get a feel for it, we’d need to play another dozen times. It’s *DEFINITELY* a game that I want to play again.

Check it out.

So… what are you playing?