Survive! Escape from Atlantis (or how my daughter learned there are no family members in competitive board games)

They look so happy! Little do they know what horrors await on the island.

So yesterday I picked up Survive! Escape from Atlantis after hearing how much fun it was as a family game. I showed my kids the video from The Dice Tower and they were excited, so we went out after dinner to Armored Gopher Games in Urbana to pick up a copy.

My innocent daughter....she's never experienced the wrath of my wife in full effect board game mode.

Survive! is a pretty simple game to understand and is very straight forward in its setup and rules. The goal is simple, get off the island and get to shore. But apparently earthquakes and volcanic activity cause things like sharks, whales, and sea monsters to feel the need to PAR-TAY, so getting to shore becomes a fight to, well, survive.

First things first, you build the island. The island is built from hexagon tiles that are two sided. One side is the type of land it is (also denoted by its thickness) and the bottom of the tile has an effect printed on it. The tiles are shuffles then randomly placed on the marked location of the board. Players then take turns placing their islanders on the island. Each islander has a point total printed on the bottom. At the end of the game, the amount of survivors that have gotten to safety have their point total added up and the highest point total wins the game. To get off the island, players either swim to safety or, more effectively, use boats which are also placed by them to get to shore.

Our island, ready to start crumbling

I need to say that the components are great. This game looks fantastic in play. Some people have mentioned issues with their meeples and the numbers on the bottom, but ours were all just fine.

A players turn is very straight-forward for the most part. They can play a tile they have, then they make up to three legal moves, then they pull another tile from the island. This is where the first bit of "mean" comes in. Since all tiles start off full, the likelihood of someone going into the drink is high. Movement is limited while your bobbing about the sea, so it is annoying. But being in the drink isn't terrible at first, since there are no sharks. Oh but they'll appear...don't worry. Finally players roll a die that tells them what type of sea beast to move.

Tiles have three types of effects. Some are instant and do things like place a shark or whale on the board. Others are usable at the beginning of your turn to move a shark or a have a dolphin save a swimmer of yours. The last types can cancel the effects of either sharks or whales. 

My son contemplating his move

Now is as good a time as any to talk about the evils of the seas. If this game were set on land, it would have lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) But we're stuck with sharks, whales, and sea monsters; which are all awesome in their own right. These start to appear on the board because of the instant effects of tiles removed and one of them gets moved based on what is rolled by a player at the end of their turn.

• Sea Monsters can move once and devour both the boat and the islanders on that hex if any
• Sharks can move twice and devour any swimmers on the hex if any
• Whales can move three times and just knock islanders off of their boats. 

For the record, I will not be wearing a Save the Whales t-shirt any time I play Survive! Seriously, boo the whales ...Anyway. This is where things get really cutthroat. Players are knocking other players off of boats, playing Jaws as the shark and eating others islanders. It gets pretty nasty. But it's also extremely fun.

Shortly after I got married, I was playing cards with my wife and in-laws. We were playing Contract Rum, and it was not a nice game either. At one point, after calling for a card out of turn myself, my wife who was sitting to my right decided to take it out of turn, despite not really needing it. I said, "That was mean." And my mother-in-law looks at me and says, "There are no mothers or grandmothers in card games." Which is to say, you play for fun, but play to win, no matter who you are playing against. Survive! exemplifies this. It is, in fact, one of the most "TAKE THAT" games that I've played. But that is why the game really works.

The beach is GONE

I've made it a point to never really take it easy on my kids when we play competitive games anyway, because if I do that, they don't learn. It also helps with them not being sore losers. My son uses it as an opportunity to understand the strategies of a game and then beings to employ them himself in subsequent plays. My daughter, being only 6, has to this point needed help, so when we've played games like Kings of Tokyo and Small World, someone was generally helping her. With Survive! it was really the first time she did it all on her own. We weren't playing nice either (nor was she, to be fair) and with the only real help being the reminder of rules a time or two during play, she managed to be the winner.

I really enjoyed this game and it was a big hit with the family. My kids loved it so much, in fact, that they've played it twice more themselves in the two days that we've owned it. The theme really works for them and they would run up after their plays and tell me about how one of their guys jumped off the mountain into the water to try to make it to a boat or how the sharks were circling around only to get swallowed up by a whirlpool. I'm kind of sad that I never got to play this game as a kid, but honestly its just as fun now as an adult. The few things that would be turnoffs for some (not incredibly deep, some amount of randomness with the tile drawing) are the same reasons why it is a perfect game for the family or as a filler game. What matters for me is if I had fun playing it and without a doubt, Survive! was fun from the beginning to the end for all of us.

Featuring the aptly named WHALEBOAT