The Wet Retirement Special: Black Fleet & Survive Reviews

but maybe you decide that when the board shifts like the shifting sands of arabia land or nevada and it takes some money away and i don't have it anymore it's not usual for game critics to last very long one reason for that is that you'd struggle to raise a family on this money actually you'd struggle to raise a medium-sized bird but another reason is just that critics run out of stuff to say and i've been doing this for three years now so this week i'm preparing for my inevitable end with new release from space cowboys black fleet [Music] you see i won't be asked with a long manual and black fleet has a simple one my failing eyes will need a big board black fleet has that my failing fingers will need huge miniatures and black fleet has that and my failing soul will need a really nice inlay and look it's a skull and crossbones inlay amazing and it works for three to four players and that's great because i'm sure matt and paul will be there with me and brendan might be alive now ah look at this what you're doing here in black fleet is you are trying to make money enough money to ransom the governor's daughter in this jackson pollock caribbean each player is going to have one large merchant ship and one small pirate ship that's trying to steal from the merchants it's so simple simple enough for you grandpappy quinns shut up as by god as my witness i'll spank you again let's get more detailed let me explain to you exactly how your turn works you're going to have two movement cards in your hand okay you're going to play one of them and you're going to look at the numbers on that card which show how much you can move different ships so first off your merchant which is has cubes on it indicating that it's heaving with valuable goods is going to move say five spaces on the card you played one two three four five and there's a lovely do do do like you're playing a board game and you're a kid again as you count the spaces off it's nice so they're just trying to deliver cargo meanwhile your pirate your slim little pirate which wants to rob other players merchant ships and then bury the treasure in beaches around the board is gonna be moving one two three four looking for prey meanwhile you also get to move one of the two enormous navy ships in the middle of the board and these things can sink pirates it's like a crap ecosystem so then you're gonna look at your card and you wanna see i can move the purple one two spaces and you're gonna go do do and immediately this is one thing and it is tremendously personal okay everyone is just trying to get through the day but getting through the day involves ruining other players turns not least because this weird cramped caribbean often has really tiny one-lane highways between the islands and that means that you just can't get through so even the merchants end up getting in people's way and that's before you start robbing and sinking one another let's get this straight if you want a simulation if you want the smell of tobacco heaving from your cargo hulls and dangerous storms getting you worried you want merchants and marauders and i'll include our link to this excellent board game in the video description if you just want a fist fight in an elevator that's going to have your friends giggling and playing with big chunky components this is it you know what else i like the fact that the miniatures offload your job of remembering stuff to the physical nature of the game like look you always know that merchants carry three cubes because they've got three cube slots and you always know that pirates when they show up only have a mug you for one cube because they've only got one cube slot and they can't mug you again because they're full and they have to go away and bury it it's just good design actually it's kind of just designed full stop it's amazing how doing this job makes your standard slip but but but but black fleet is not some i have no idea what happened there stodgy strategy game okay it's not very importantly a game of counting spaces so your merchant ships always take a route that leaves them just out of route of the nearby pirate ships of moving the navy vessels into the mathematically best catchment zone no no no because of these fortune cards uh kind of take that cards which we should really have a better name for them right now shut up and sit down tends to deride these special one-shot powers where players get hands of them and goes i've broken a rule and now i've done this thing that you couldn't have expected we don't like them often because if your game isn't exciting or surprising enough probably there are problems with the mechanics themselves and this is these decks of cards are always just a kind of gum that sticks games together and stops players from noticing the game they're playing isn't enormously well designed but in black fleet they work as they sometimes do because in tweaking the rules constantly players can never be sure that they're making the right moves or they stop calculating and start going by their gut they start having fun and you know what because they're also quite funny if your merchant ship escapes a pirate and then the pirate catches up with them using a tidal wave that neatly carries them over an island allowing them to catch up and mug you that's going to be funny for everyone probably you as well when you likewise manage to escape a pirate blockade a lot of pirates blocking my way using a a whirlwind if there's just a sudden whirlwind and you go up and then and you swap locations and then you carry on your way and you dump your cargo in port immediately that's funny and if you approach black fleet with this kind of heart the game will show you heart back lots of just funny stories of the merchant that gets dogged by a pirate ship the entire course of its journey that play is screaming at you the whole time and finally you remove his last cargo cube and sink him just outside of the port or the pirate who gets sunk by the purple navy goes away and then the player brings him back and then a freak wind pushes the navy vessel all the way to the corner of the board again and sinks your pirate none of these things are frustrating because they're all just tiny setbacks you know black fleet is about nickel and diming your way to glory speaking of which the nickels and dimes that you're playing with are actual really nice metal coins i said this before somewhere and shut up sit down but why is it metal coins are so exciting in board games and so boring in real life but wait we're not across this ocean of nonsense just yet because before buying the governor's daughter that wins them the game players also need to buy all of their upgrade cards that are unique randomized personal to you at the start of each game and these are traditionally another american-style board game mechanic that we make fun of because i don't care that you're paying five gold coins to marginally increase the power of this on your turn i'm disinterested in black fleet though it's another example of how these mechanics can be made to work best for three reasons the first of which the upgrade cards are released with an amount of flare of theater because suddenly someone delivers a load of cargo and flips a card and says yeah i know the person who's in this town now so i'm going to get how much money you say or you're chasing a merchant and then they just turn on a dime and blow you up because they have cannons now these cow powers are also simple enough that you can memorize them and most importantly they get around a problem in america style games where players are punished for taking good early turns because everyone else gangs up on them in this you just get upgrades for having good early turns upgrades that are going to help you win and actually that's not a problem blackfleet usually suffers from anyway because it's mean enough and players just turn into hyenas you're not going to go for the player who's in the lead because you could make a fast buck continuing to mug the player who's in last place which again hopefully you'll find funny and you know my aging rotting brain will say it's funny because the weaker being bullied all in all black fleet is just aggressively pleasant you know it's got this pleasant game that wants you to be really aggressive with pleasant balance but tons of variety in being so eager to please it's got this really lovely board but that really wants you to like the skull and crossbones inlay and the metal coins and the fact that all the cards have different art even though it's only slightly different but for the right group that wants to roll some dice and drink some beers and be a bit clever and have some fun shut up and sit down recommends i'll say to my social service worker who's come to clean out my litter tray and he'll say that's very funny mr smith but you need to take your medication oh of course thank you goodbye right same time tomorrow so there's a reason we can't recommend black fleet because there's another game a game that they won't let me have because i get too excited there's something else that's for three to four players set at sea that sees players doing horrible things to each other and if you haven't heard of this one boy are you in for a treat it's called survive escape from atlantis patron saint of elderly board game reviewers tom vassell has a super good point which is that while board games fall in and out of print and that's annoying the really good ones don't go away which is why it's relevant that the addition of survive you can buy today is the 30th anniversary edition oh my goodness now if you take one look at this board you can see something magical is going to happen we've got an island that is packed with civilians we don't seem to have enough votes for them we have the fact that if you remove hexes you reveal see underneath there are sea monsters here and if we just rotate the camera then you can see that set off to one side are a load of tiny sharks we've said before that games that get players excited during setup and rules explanations are the best frankly and survive could be the mother of all of those you give your players a very simple appealing objective get to the safe islands in the corners of the board you give them a terrifying obstacle the continent is sinking there aren't enough boats there's a documentaries worth of horrible huge sea monsters out there there are rules for swimming and then you crown this cocktail with a nightmarish twist which is when the setup starts nobody's people are on the board so let's say i'm playing red and then you tell everybody to look at the bottom of their people and you'll see that everybody has a different tiny number can you see that printed on the bottom that's a one and a four and those are victory points you'll get for getting these people safe so the four might be a pop idol and the one might be a brendon and then you get everyone to place all these people on the board but the twist once the game started and you've put your people down you can never look to remember which is which ever again till the end of the game then you find out you've just rescued loads of brendan's survive loses none of this momentum as you all go splashing into turn one see first off in your turn you're going to have an amount of moving points that in this turn i might spend moving my red men all into boats once you've spent your movement point you pick up any tile starting with all the desert tiles then all the forest then all the mountains you look at the reverse of that tile it's going to be a power you can use later or in this case a whale just appears the beach sinks and a whale just bursts out from underneath it see evocative thematic and then finally you roll a dice to see what flavor of sea creature you can move i can move one of these sea creatures my boat's over here so i'm gonna move this one all the way over there and that's the game and like shut up and sit down favorite galaxy trucker the really important thing here is sheldon freud sea monsters smash boats whales smash boats sharks eat swimmers and when that happens to you you're not too fast you know the emotional payoff there is not much but because there are more players than you mostly it's going to be happening to other people and the shout and freud pay off when you dodge this terrible terrible occurrence is fantastic you are laughing and dodging bullets for the whole game very quickly you'll go from having that neat board like this into something like this sharks devouring swimmers whales smashing boats sea monsters smashing everything oh god survive might be the example of how effective an important theme can be for a game because the game here is good we'll get back to the theme in a minute it's great in fact and it's flexible which i've realized now is the most important trait for a family game because the very young or drunk can just delight in causing chaos and smashing boats the say older kids can try and win and get their people to shore but if you're clever you know the kind of teenagers can try and remember where their high value people are and get them to the shore first or the totally insane like hyper competitive grandmothers of the world can remember where their people are and also watch other players and figure out who's valuable because of course nothing stops you using a whale to crush a boat that you have people on if you think it's worth more points to your opponents ah but with that theme though with that theme somehow board games have got to the point where most of the games on my shelves are fantasy or sci-fi or historical and that's fine it certainly sells well but survive plays with something so much better because it plays on very real human fears and experiences you know the idea of the boat you're on being smashed by a whale and suddenly you are treading water in shark infested waters that's terrifying being stood on a mountain and watching forests disappear beneath you you know you get a picture in your mind's eye or just the hilariousness of having two players from different teams in the same boat literally in the same boat and then watching them argue over which way to go because there's a sea monster over there but there's loads of boats and whales over there it's funny the whole experience is just elevated and going on the record now real fears of humans to do with water is better than elves bells if you want to expand survive then there are there are giant squids and there are dive dice that monsters dive around the board and make it more complicated and mr smith were you talking about expansions again so what if i was you can't keep me cooped up in here forever [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 109,646

Rating: 4.956831 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Black Fleet, Survive

Id: ya3OjEtB_Es

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/UNO_LegacyTM]

This is a reupload of an older video if I'm not mistaken. Still quality though.

[u/[deleted]]

Damn, they should add "reupload" to the title. I was like "wait, why doesn't he mention Tom?" at the 1:40 mark.

[u/lesslucid]

In the brief moments before I clocked that it was a reupload, seeing Paul lifted my hopes... before they were cruelly dashed on the rocks...

[u/McCurry]

I think SUSD should advertise their older videos more often. They all still very much relevant today. It did be great to give old crusty games some love.

As a bonus, I would add a 5 mins new clip for a updated take. It would be great to see how the original review aged :)

[u/IntriguedToast]

I still very much love Survive - it just goes on so well with everyone. It's got bucket-loads of 'Take-that' (as well as giving it back!) but as it's pretty much the main focus, it just adds to the chaos. Lots of fun!

[u/abastecki]

My original concern seeing the thumb nail and video title was "Oh no, Quinns is retiring from SUSD."

The muted autoplay on my phone which showed Quinns and Paul made me think Quinns was reminiscing and was retiring from SUSD.

Then I realized it was just an old video.

(P.S. Please don't go.)

[u/robotco]

ahhh that's why Survive was on the hotness today. i was like... huh, that's weird.

[u/dsaddons]

I bought Black Fleet a few years back because the board looked absolutely gorgeous, found the game to be a bit boring though unfortunately and traded it away.

[u/rjtas]

Survive is available in Target 3 for price of 2 sale.