Captain Sonar - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

okay that last review posted and see for impressions nice bit of post junk on coverage in the classic Quinn's I go oh my god what see the computer disengage alarm why why what Quinn's demand for reviews is at critical levels the people they are going crazy for reviews they just can't get enough all right engage Code Red I don't know what that means okay let's talk about shot open sit-downs game of Gen Con in 2016 let's talk about captain sonar a game best described as battleship meets a competent designer and then they have a love affair and they break up and the competent designer meets space cadets die steel and they have a one-night stand and pretend it never happened it's basically like nothing else you have owned or thought about owning which i think is the best possible start a review can have in the game of captain sonar two teams sit opposite this ground screen all working together collectively controlling a submarine in a deadly game of cat and mouse or sometimes cat and cat mouse and mouse mouse and sitting duck or the very short game of cat and sitting duck there are four stations on each submarine which means if you have less than eight players players are going to have to double up and control two stations at once which is a recipe for panic attacks because the best way to play captain Sola is in real time all right so how often can you move the submarine as many times as you like or at least until the engineer states some variation of stop oh god stop or no no no no no no no no No and with that let's begin your laughably brief Naval Academy with the captain welcome to the captain's chair with the captain's board and the captain's pen in fact there are no components in caps and sonar just pens and white clear sheets which means packing it away and sucking it up takes that long takes one metric click of the fingers to set it up and it made me wonder why more board games don't do this so at the start of the game you're going to take your captain's pen you're going to mark where you start you're going to start there which means that yes two ships could start on the same space and from here the captain is moving the submarine and basically playing the world's most involved game of snake you declare each time you move head west you might say loudly we'll get to why and then you're going to mark your new position but you can never cross your own path head north you might say and you move north every time you move you have to wait for the engineer and the first mate to do their job before you can move again now why are you shouting why shout why be so gauche well let's jump over to the radio operator the radio operator is an extraordinarily cool job you've got your pen you've got your math and you've got your million dollar government issue sheet of acetate and every time you hear the enemy commander move you're gonna mark it on this sheet of acetate head north head West had North had north head east and you don't know where they are but because they can't go through Islands you're sliding your acetate around trying to find out where they could be by process of elimination you're also marking down when they drop mines or when they fire torpedoes because this is all information you can use later or that you can use to zero and in their position and when you have them or you think you do you pass that on to your captain in what will probably be an incredibly creepy stage whisper captain I think they're right here I think I think they're right here I think we can go and kill them all with a torpedo and blow them up then they're all all be dead let's take a second to appreciate that this is already the best game ever oh my god so there's two stations left you want the good news or the bad news first good news great so the good news is that every time you move your trusty first officer is choosing which system to charge in fact you can't move again until they've given you the all-clear and so if you move once you're a third of the way to readying a torpedo fantastic to use any of these systems the captain or sometimes the first mate depends on the system declares stop everyone puts their pens down the captain resists the urge to say hammer time and then you declare what system you're using and how you're going to use it let's quickly walk you through the cool systems torpedos seem like a good thing to ask about first in my life experience phalluses often are the torpedo can hit up to four spaces away so firing one gives a big clues to where you are but fortune favors the bold probably you declare what space you're heading with the door pedo and the other boat has to tell you it's a Miss or a 1 damage in direct hit meaning they were right next to it or a direct hit meaning they've taken two of the four damage it takes for them to lose the game and you now know exactly where they are mines are exactly the same as torpedoes but first you release them to any space next to you by declaring dropping a mine giving the enemy radio operator a chance to write it down somewhere but not exactly where it is and then you can detonate it later whenever you want like if you lure the enemy into your minefield and I've never seen that happen but then I'm incompetent the other systems relates to finding or not wanting to being finding slash found any my own slash more stopping the game for a drone lets you pick a sector on your map 1 2 3 4 is any 9 and simply ask the team if they're there yes or no sonar is more involved and fun unless you're the radio operator in which case it amounts to Satan taking a giant dump of a puzzle in your lap you see the enemy captain once you use a sonar picks two of the following three things y axis x axis or the detective therein and tells you two of them except one is true and one's a lie at which point the captain who use the Sun is going to turn to their radio operator and go does that help and the radio is going to look at that thing the panic and then remind themselves that slapping the captain might result in them getting shot finally we have silenced the system in Captain sonar that no one charges until they realize it's the most important system in the game declaring to the table you're spending your silence lets you move one two three or four spaces in a straight line without telling the other team which direction you went in or how many spaces in other words if they have you then they lose you for a hot second the final role we have to talk about is the engineer who contrary to what it sounds like isn't so much the motor that keeps the ship running as the bag of spanners emptied into the flywheel to make sure it functions as a game so here's the thing every time the captain moves they can't move again until first cool first officers charged to cool system and the engineer has broken something you're kind of the village idiot of the ship except you're also maybe the most important role of all you see let's say the captain goes north you have to then break something in the North box so if anything you're not an engineer you're a reverse engineer except without the positive connotations of that phrase nuclear symbols are a good thing to break because they don't do anything yet if the captain moves north again you have to check something else to strike off and when you strike it off the first officer and the captain can no longer use the corresponding system so drun and sonar mines and torpedoes or silent running the good news is if you manage to mark off everything but the captain went north north and then east again because you've completed this link chain you get to wipe everything off but the only other scenario which you're going to be wiping stuff off is if you break the ship which are going to do by breaking everything in a particular box so at this point you go no no no no no to the captain don't go north anymore because if that happens then it you do get to wipe off all the damage on the ship but the ship also takes one permanent point of damage and similarly those fun-loving nuclear symbols I had your mark enough because then I'm doing a thing if you mark off all of them again the ship takes a damage and you wipe everything off so to get around this horrible game as the ship starts breaking and steam starts pouring out of all the vents and you can't use any systems the engineer is going to start going captain let's surface because when you surface you clean everything off and Oh God so when the captain decides to surface it's lovely it's really nice you feel the Sun on your [ __ ] everyone on your team puts that pins down so you can't play anymore you get to wipe off that big long snake you made so you can go anywhere when you submerge again it's a wipe all the engineering damage off and it's even fun because none of you can play the radio operator has to just listen and memorize every movement the other team makes so when you submerge again they hand the radio operator can mark down everything that's fun for them definitely not stressful and and then you will get to play a minigame to let you go back below the water again you have to do an engineering check you have to take turns or only one at a time guys not all at once drawing a nice line around a bit of the submarine the engineer the other team when they say yeah you can submerge and it's fine that's not stressful though stress just don't think about the fact that the other team are going to be racing towards you below the waters just rushing to your sector as fast as possible so they can fire some torpedos into it don't listen don't even listen to them don't listen to the sound of approaching torpedos it's probably just a nice dolphin coming towards us to give us a kiss the final thing to add is that if you can't muster the six seven or eight players that are really required to play captain solo is a real-time game making it a turn-based game is as simple as flipping everyone's sheets and the maps gets smaller the systems require less time to charge and you get this intense strategy game I mean lots of the puzzles were really designed to be completed against the clock so maybe the best solution is to play it with a little chess clock app on your phone but basically it still works with four three or even two very obsessive players but for the rest of this review really were going to be reviewing it as a real time game and not just because this is the game I fell in love with but because this is all board games can be you know captain sonar the real time game is something where you look at the components and you want to know more the first thing you do is all the players name the submarine which is funny the rules explanation is thought-provoking you'd love I've lost my pen you start playing and it's tense then you finish playing and you just talk about it and your friends go home and you keep thinking about it and if it's 2011 you start a website called shut up and sit down because you just have to tell people that games like this exist I'm going to assume that you can see how the concept of captain sonar is as fun as it is so let me just do my job of it and let you know why it's exactly as fun as it is to play when you're actually experiencing it and the reason why is really this is nothing more or less than an immaculate co-op game where everyone has their own perspective interesting corner of the store everyone gets to feel important and special everyone can do more save their team depending on how well they do and of course you're going to want to try all the different roles because they're all so different but all still completely capable of absorbing you utterly and yet and yet this is more exciting than lots of co-op games simply because the only person who understands what you're going through is your opposition and a human opposition is so much more interesting and engaging than the artificial opponent that co-op games give you you know it's like you're trying to outfox humans you can trick them you can predict them and of course there's an underlying base tension while playing captain sonar that is so vivid because they're hunting you but the fact that this is a game about communication with human opponents leads to an incredibly tricky psychological reef for your team to navigate which is simply how loudly you say stuff and when because obviously you're going to want to keep everything secret the only thing you have to announce loudly is whenever you move or drop a mine which means that if you're down here and you realize something then you ever want to get the torpedoes ready you know like but that game of Chinese whispers is only going to slow your team down much better than to say out loud things said you're broadcasting to the other team you know and like this is where it becomes funny that someone is always sat at furthest possible point from someone else and it's always the radio operator and the engineer if the radio operator realizes that they know where the other person is quickly if I speak it we can fire but in the time it takes that could mean the difference between the engineer breaking the torpedo tubes or not it's impossible it's so good it's so different and agree with me for that there is nothing better in board gaming than being introduced to a revolutionary new idea and having to get to grips with it wait so you're telling me that we're working together but every time we take a turn something bad happens whoa wait so I can put a worker anywhere I want and just have that reward for free well what if someone else wants to go there wait I don't understand then how do we know which players are loyal and which ones are spies and now it's 2016 and I'm playing captain sonar and I'm saying things like wait but once the other team works out where you are they'll know where you are for the rest of the game unless you do something about it it's it's perfect and incidentally that thing I just mentioned about figuring out exactly where you are gives captain Sona are really interesting arc and you know we love board games with an arc here at shadow pen sit down with different phases because they're interesting but it means in this game specifically when you start you have no idea where the other team are and then you gradually narrow that down and then maybe you go for that first approach where you come towards each other and then you exchange fire and you get confirmation and then you know exactly where they are and then you're just charging systems and [ __ ] you then someone blows up and then you talk about it and you just put the game down and you relax and you talk about your personal experience that you didn't have time to share because of course this is a real-time game about secrecy and then oh yeah and then the person who owns the game pops up in the box and goes oh by the way there are different maps there are different maps with different rules the it's recommended in fact that you play them not quite as a campaign but in sequence because they get gradually more complicated the Bravo map is very similar but with lust islands so it's hard to pin the other team down working all your way up to where is it the Arctic map which has gaps in the ice and those are the only places that you can surface without taking damage so once you're pooling around in the middle the captain already has two felt thinking about asking the engineer which of these ice holes you can get back to you might have noticed that six systems on the sheet one I didn't explain that's the scenario thing which is going to relate to different scenarios like echomap whether our minds already built around the map and any team can detonate any of them at any point and by the way this game sold out its first print run in France which means that Madiga are probably gonna do an expansion because they're a publisher that likes expansions that means more maps and more to look forward to and if you like me and you have a disease then you'll be excited to buy captain sonar purely so you can buy an expansion for it later what the hell is wrong with me but as far as talking goes I think I can actually stop talking you know sometimes we have to explain why games are fun but sometimes a game speaks for itself and this is one that shouts for it so all I need to do is tell you that yeah it's as fun as it looks and I won't I mean obviously shall consider and recommends but rather learning with that I just want to end with a story because what games are about sharing moments sharing stories and we were pending one game and after that initial chase with the two submarines stop closing in on each other and they fire me fired and it was a direct hit and they fired and all the calculations meant that they were just one square off leading to an indirect hit and in that sudden juking were there running away and then we're trying to charge our torpedoes the captain says stop he turns to his solo person and says do we still have them sonar operator says yeah have the engineer the system's green yeah first mate is the tube loaded yeah and he said fire I mean blew them out of the water and we won the game but believe it or not that's not the point of that story the point is that that was such an awesome moment for our crew to share amount of community work together and then just such precision together it was perfect it was really perfect and that's a moment we'll always remember I'm always share and yeah that's what shut up and sit down is about so what are you what do you think supercomputer were we right to make captain so not our game of Gen Con 2016 yes there are seven game goons would you like to go to one no but I got a Seng employee database please rate your harmful be on a scale of one to five how many times I'm not a homophobe security official at five is I put the owner in harmful but there is no oh no in homophobe updating dictionary please tell me how many noes are in harmful G just never mind just invoice the company for one red light bulb affirmative searching for Megan iceberg sounding are

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 441,728

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Shut Up Show, Shut Up, Sit Down, Board Games, Board Gaming, Family Games, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Paul Dean, Matt Lees, captain sonar, matagot

Id: Yjo4iXyDPtw

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 12 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/daybreaker]

One of the things we want to do at our store is set up a Captain Sonar league or tournament where people form their own submarine teams, and compete.

We can either do one or two games at scheduled times in a league, or maybe even buy a few copies for simultaneous games and give those away as the prizes to the winning team.

This way people dont need to find 7 others to play. They can find 3 more, or join a pickup team looking for members. And maybe even win stuff in the process.

[u/psytrooper]

Genuinely feel like I won the lottery here by finding out about this game a few days ago and putting a copy on hold at my FLGS the day before a glowing SUSD review comes out :)

Also, to the skeptics, notice how flexible this game is for low player counts and non-real time folks... Even if it's a diminished experience, you will still get value out of this game and, at that once-a-year big group game, you will LOVE it.

[u/dictionary_hat_r4ck]

With that story at the end, I really feel like Quinns and I share a common outlook on this game and maybe all games: It's about people. People make games. People play games. People need some sort of social cohesiveness and interaction. When we forget about our mutual humanity and just get mired in rules and an obsession with winning, we lose that social cohesiveness and -- for me anyway -- lose that element that makes games so satisfying.

Ironic that this is about blowing people up, but still, you see my point. Well, Quinns' point.

I also thought it was fascinating that he calls it a co-op rather than team game. Small point, yes, but interesting.

[u/VogonPoetryLover]

Probably won't buy this cause I don't know when I'll ever have 8 people together who are interested in doing something like this but I do hope I'll get a chance to try it at some point. Looks like great fun.

[u/musingly]

SU&SD is seriously the best advertiser a publisher could ask for. I knew I wanted to buy this game before I even understood what it was. And now my order is placed.

[u/[deleted]]

I'd be grabbing this one in a heartbeat if I honestly thought that I could get a group of 6 together to play. Best I am ever able to do semi-consistently is 4 or 5. 8 will never happen.

[u/eviljelloman]

biggest regret of Gencon is not playing this game. It looked so ridiculous and fun, and I just don't know when I'll have the group to play it or the patience to teach it.

[u/mattigus]

I can see this game completely replacing Space Cadets for me. The components are simpler, it looks easier to teach, and looks more fun.

[u/fastattaq]

I bought this game yesterday at my FLGS. All I need now are seven friends in one room at the same table at the same time!