Captain Sonar floored me

I went into Captain Sonar as a con event with these pieces of knowledge: you used dry erase markers, it took a lot of players and a lot of people really like it.

What I discovered was one of my best gaming experiences of 2018. Honestly, I don’t look back at years and try to mark down, say, five highlights but my introduction to Captain Sonar is one that will stay with me and I’ll bore friends about years to come.

In Captain Sonar, you are playing two crews of two submarines that are trying to blow each other into greasy clouds of smoke. On each team, there is a captain who plans the route and activates the systems, the first mate who charges the systems, the engineer who damages and repairs the systems and the radio operator who listens to other captain and desperately tries to figure out where the enemy sub is.

You know, there are other reviews that describe Captain Sonar in much better and greater detail and I haven’t even looked at them. I’m trying less to review the game than distill my experience of learning the game and playing it four times in a row.

Captain Sonar takes the theme and even some of the core mechanics of Battleship, a game I’ll begrudgingly say works, and turned into a harrowing, edge of your seat experience that is also an amazing experience in team work. Seriously, I won’t be surprised if Captain Sonar has been used as a corporate team building exercise.

Captain Sonar’s individual mechanics are pretty simple. Actually, even taken together, the mechanical side of the game is still simple. However, add in the real time aspect of the game, and those simple mechanics become a frantic, desperate scramble. I understand you can play it turn-based but that would kill so much of the fun.

Some of my friends would classify Captain Sonar as a party game and I can see that. With its very exact player-count, I think I would have to become some kind of youth group leader before I’d buy it. But boy would I play it again and I think it’s an experience any kind of gamer would really get something out of.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/171131/captain-sonar

My RinCon 2018

In September, I went to what I realized was my fifth RinCon. (I don’t actually know when the convention started) And that’s not counting all the fundraising events I’ve been to, which are basically mini-conventions.

And RinCon keeps on delivering for me. The people who run it are all very friendly and seem to know what they’re doing. There’s plenty of free play area and I’m always able to put together a good schedule of events.

I had thought about trying to actually trying to write my entire experience in detail but, honestly, that’d be boring for everyone but me so I’ll just try and hit the highlights.

The best experience I had was learning Captain Sonar and then playing it four times in a row. I went in knowing it was a real-time game with dry erase markers. I found out it was a game of two submarines trying to blow each up with four players manning each submarine. It was an intense, really fun experience. With the requirement of eight players to really make it work, I’d never buy it but I’d definitely play it again. I might actually never pass up a game :D

I got a chance to play Echidna Shuffle, which I don’t think has actually been formally released. It’s a very simple Pick-Up-and-Deliver game for kids with incredibly cute components while there are a lot of neat design choices. I’m pretty sure adults who focus on blocking plays rather than deliver would stall the game out big time, although I’m not sure that’s a winning strategy unless your opponents rage quit. But I’m seriously thinking about getting the game for our son.

And the last game I played at RinCon was a three-player game of For Sale, a game I take to every event I go to anymore, and it came down to a three-way tie. The winner broke the tie by having one two-bit coin left from the first half. That was a great way to end my RinCon.

I got in eighteen separate plays over the day and a half I was at RinCon and I learned seven different games. I picked up a used copy of Turbo Taxi, which I think our son might have fun with, and won a copy of Dungeon Rush. I had a good time :)