I remember opening up the command console for the first time, having the miss and hit pegs spill out on the table. Placing the carrier and battleship with utmost care on the sculpted ocean grid and then randomly tossing in the maintenance ship as an afterthought. All the excitement and energy that seemed to build endlessly as visions of submarine warfare filled your head instantly dropped off the Marianas Trench when the actual game got started. Instead of speeding through the open seas, you were anchored down in a single location, a sitting rubber ducky. Rather than launching the rockets in a barrage of fire and fury, you played a coordinates crossword with the translucent blue dartboard. It felt more like bingo than the promised Battleship. Worse than the solitary fact of the tedious nature of gameplay was the realization that there was no way to keep your opponent in check. After 6 missed torpedoes in a row, the only way to tell if the commander across from you was playing correctly was to end the game. You look in disbelief as each shot had precariously outlined your opponent’s fleet. After reassuring them that you would never distrust their intentions again a peace treaty is signed and the boards are wiped clean. Want to play again? Maybe not for a week, or two, or ever.
This is the feeling I remember most from this game. I don’t know if I ever really finished a game of Battleship where the opponent had at least one hit on each of my ships. It was merely a matter of time. Playing the odds. If I guessed correctly on all his ships positions and orientations I had a slight chance at victory. That was the entirety of the game. Guesswork. The game of battleship is the definition of hit or miss. It only seems fitting that the cinematic adaptation echoed so much of the frustration I felt as a kid. Boats….that battle….in the seas…..and aliens! Maybe that could have infused some life into this stationary stalemate. If only there was a way to take all the intrigue and thematic tension inherent to aquatic battle and apply it to an aptly named board game. It would need to have the solitary sense of war while still being accessible, be secretive but have a design that speaks for itself. So if it wasn’t obvious up to this point the game exists and it’s called Captain Sonar. A 2-8 player behemoth of unparalleled, unique role driven, colorfully contextual communal competition of the c’s (seas). Alliteration aside this game is equal parts chaos and control. The best teams work both alone and together, towards individual tasks and shared goals. The game pits two sides against each other, just as in Battleship, but it focuses on the control of a single ship in its entirety rather than the placement of 5 ships in their trivial brevity. The game is split up into 4 roles, each with a unique skill to be acquired.
The inherent beauty of this game is in the simplicity of individual roles in the midst of a sea of team based complexities. The captain leads the ship, plotting its course and telling the first mate which systems he plans on using in the not too distant future. The first mate keeps track of the ship’s hit points, attack and defense systems, all while conveying information between the captain and the engineer. The engineer tries to keep the majority of the ship’s systems running by scraping other systems for parts, rendering them useless until fixed. Lastly the map operator listens to the opposition’s directional commands, hoping to piece together the enemy’s coordinates and mirroring their ship’s course through sheer force of will.
Best of all this game can be played a second time back-to-back with all the roles switched resulting in a table wide “aha” moment about how their counterpart was playing the game before. So let’s tally the wave of emotion this game covers. On the cresting edge there is unique player actions, no down time waiting to have fun, communication and literal team building with friends, dry erase player boards that encourage experimentation and mistakes. Now for the unavoidable trough and the elements that could make this game sink or swim based on your game group. The game demands 8 players. (It can be played with 2 people but at that point you might as well enlist in the actual navy to get anything close to the action of the 8 player version) The game demands your full attention. There are no turns to catch your breath or step away or look at your phone or make idle conversation with friends about a cat video you saw the other day. There is only survival and victory in the face of an unrelenting enemy every bit as cunning and deceptive as you. But again this could be a plus for many people. You have a group of dedicated game folk who gather every week to join in celebration of the life changing power of tabletop gaming. Needless to say this does not apply or appeal to every fan of games. Even I had to part ways with the game after owning it for months and playing it only a handful of times. In my experience it’s difficult enough getting 8 people to agree to playing a game (most often this occurs at a party or social gathering of some sort) but the added intense concentration demanded by gameplay really knocks the accessibility of the experience. And that really is what this game thrives on, the experience. The feeling of dire straits. The battle for control on the high seas. And if that is what you are after, there is little else that does it so well with so few components in the span of an hour.
TL;DR The game is great at 8, don't hesitate to buy it at any rate
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