Manufacturer: Stronghold Games
Designer: Julian
Courtland-Smith
Year: 2011
Survive:
Escape from Atlantis! is a re-make of the classic Waddingtons game Escape from
Atlantis in which players are trying to escape from the island of Atlantis
which is sinking. Standing in their way are sharks, whales and sea monsters,
but most importantly the other players who are generally quite selfish in their
efforts to find a boat or swim for freedom.
In Survive, each
player takes 10 coloured meeple who they need to place on the island of
Atlantis. The island is made up of hex tiles representing the beach, the forest
and mountains. The beach is the least safe place to be as it sinks first, followed
in order by the forest and the mountains. Players take turns to place one
meeple each so that they can decide which are the best strategic positions on
the island. Once all meeples are placed each player also places two boats which
are the quickest means to escape the sinking island on Atlantis.
On your turn you can make three moves – move a boat one
space, move a swimming meeple, jump into or out of a boat on space or walk
across the island by one space. You then flip one of the island tiles, which
may well drop a meeple into the sea, making it perfect shark bait! Each tile
has a special action on the reverse which is either immediate eg. a
shark/whale/boat appears or can be saved for future rounds eg. a friendly
dolphin who will let you swim 3 spaces. Your final action of the turn is to
roll the dice which will allow you to move one sea creature token as per its
movement rules; whales move furthest and upturn boats if they land on them,
sharks move slightly less and can eat swimming meeple and sea monsters can only
move one space but each boats full of meeple or swimmers. Your goal is to get
as many of your meeple off the island and to the safety of the mainland as
possible, whilst simultaneously killing off your opponent’s meeples or
sabotaging their plans of getting anywhere fast.
 |
| The reverse side of the hex tiles. Green tiles are played immediately, making elements appear in the game. Red tokens wither give you a boost or can be played to cancel the movement of a sea creature that's about to eat you. |
Survive makes a
great gateway level game because the rules are not difficult to comprehend and
the game looks great on the table. The component quality is fantastic, with the
wooden sea creatures, chunky plastic meeple and particularly the three
different thicknesses of terrain tile which give the island a great
three-dimensional look. In principal the game would be great with families,
however the game can be very cut-throat and have a lot of back-stabbing – we
always preface a game with new players by telling them that this is a game
where you’re mean to each other. I can imagine that kids (and to be fair some
adults) may not deal with this element of the game very well, it may not be
strategically sound to gang up on only one other player but it’s perfectly
possible and would justifiably ruin the experience for one player.
 |
| Part way through the game as the sand is starting to sink into the sea and a few sharks and whales have now appeared in the sea. |
My other main criticism of the game is the numbers on the
bottom of the meeples. The meeples are numbered 1-6 on their base and you have
a higher quantity of 1s and 2s than the higher numbers. These represent the
points they are worth at the end of the game, which implies that you need to
try and remember where you placed your highest scoring meeples and put these at
least risk to ensure that your save them. However, this memory element has
always seemed to challenging for what is otherwise a lightweight game and I’ve
never seen anyone play anything other than ‘winner is the player who saves the
most meeples’ – this often leads to ties though and then the score becomes a
tie breaker and the score you get is essentially complete luck because you
never remembered where you put your meeples in the first place.
We have tried the game with two players where we take two
colours each and the player with the combined highest number of meeples wins.
Unfortunately the game works, but definitely loses a lot of the fun because
there’s only ever one other player to pick on. Sharing a boat in particular
just doesn’t work as no-one will send a whale in the direction of that boat.
This game is definitely at its best with the full four players so the board is
full, sea creature activations are often successful and the victimising is
spread around. We have player with the 5-6 player expansion with friends, which
was obviously much more chaotic, but didn’t seem to break the game.
 |
| The game set up ready to play, each player gets to place their own meeples and 2 boats which they hope to use to survive |
No comments:
Post a Comment