Game Session

We got to play last night a game I have wanted to play again for a long time - Red November. It was one of the first of the new wave of cooperative games that were made in recent years. You are gnomes trapped on a submarine that has a variety of hazards and is going down in 60 minutes, so you work together to maintain the sub until you are rescued: putting out fires, draining flooding, fixing engines, unblocking doors and of course not letting the Kraken outside the sub crush you! It uses a unique time tracker where you allocate time to solve problems, and whoever is last on the time track is the one whose turn it is. We got a few of the rules wrong and lost a few crew members before we corrected our mistake, and the game is incredibly difficult to win. It does not have a "traitor" type element like other coop games (BSG, Shadows over Camelot, Panic Station, Sabateur), but it does have a piece of equipment (aqualung) that a player can use to abandon ship near the end of the game if they think it is going down. That actually came into play in our game. Out of our starting 8, we had only four near the finish as we lost the others to various disasters (and negligence - we forgot to open some flooded doors and comrades were drowned). I had the aqualung, and instead of repairing the overheating electrical to help my team, I ran for a hatch to escape before the sub was destroyed. Lo and behold, my lack of help caused the sub to implode - before I could escape and we all went down. Not alone in my cowardice, Josh also had an aqualung and was trying the same thing! I have never beaten this game.

I am yellow here, in more ways than one, as I look to escape with the aqualung.

We followed it up with a few games of Dominion and introducing it to Garrett, and others played Shadow Hunters. The evening's standings (that were recorded):

Red November (all lost) - Josh, Brett, Garrett, Tyler, Dallin, Nolan, Tim, Austin
Shadow Hunters W- Jon, Daniel, Dallin, Tyler; L- Nate, Nolan, Mari, Stephen
Dominion
1- Josh, 2- Brett, 3- Nate, 4- Garrett
1- Brett, 2- Tyler, 3- Nate, 4- Garrett