Unfathomable Board Game First Impressions

Unfathomable is the Battlestar Galactica Board Game set in the sea.

It’s also set in the past, and in a Lovecraft universe.

The year is 1913. The steamship SS Atlantica is two days out from port on its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Its unsuspecting passengers fully anticipated a calm journey to Boston, Massachusetts, with nothing out of the ordinary to look forward to. However, strange nightmares plague the minds of the people aboard the ship every night; rumors circulate of dark shapes following closely behind the ship just beneath the waves; and tensions rise when a body is discovered in the ship’s chapel, signs of a strange ritual littered around the corpse.

Unfathomable Game Play

This is a top-level overview just to give a feel of how the game plays.

Some players will either be loyal humans trying to get the SS Atlantica to Boston. Some players will be loyal to the Deep Ones and they are trying to prevent this from happening.

A board is set up showing the ship and each player also has a character to play that has a special ability. Deep Ones are smaller minis that board the ship, attacking the players and other passengers while the larger Mother Hydra and Father Dagon sit in the sea causing havoc, spawning more and more Deep Ones.

I had Samira, a pickpocket and scavenger. Items were my thing.

The game is played over several phases.

Step One – Recieve Skills

The player will draw the cards shown on their character sheet. You can see from the bottom left of my sheet above that I drew 1 Lore, 2 Observation and 2 Will cards.

Step Two – Action

The player performs two actions:

Move, to any space on the ship.
Attack, gainst a Deep One in the same space. The player rolls a D6 and on a 4 or higher, the Deep One is defeated.
Rescue a Passenger, in the same area as the player.
Use an Action, on the player’s character sheet or any skill or item cards.
Use the ship’s ability, of the space the player is in.

Step 3 – Mythos

The current player draws and resolves the top card of the mythos deck. These have events that affect the ship and/or the people on board.

Crisis – Provides a problem that must be solved.
Monster Activation – Well, this causes monsters to activate.
Track – This causes one of the tracks on the game board to advance.

Travel & Ritual Tracks

The travel track shows how far the ship is from Boston. Each time the token on the travel track advances, all
monsters in water spaces are moved one water space backwards to show the ship’s progression. When a
waypoint is reached, the player with the Captain title (Which can change as the game goes on) draws the top
two cards of the waypoint deck, chooses one to resolve and places the other on the bottom.

Each waypoint card has a distance value at the top of the card. The higher the distance value, the more fuel the waypoint requires.

The ritual track represents the passengers’ progress toward casting the greater banishment spell to get rid of the baddies on the ship. When the token on the ritual track reaches the Cast space, all monsters, characters, and
passengers above deck and in the water surrounding the ship are struck by the greater banishment spell.

Skill Checks

Skills checks occur when players have a situation that needs resolving. All players may secretly add cards from their hand to the check face down, along with a couple of random ones added from a chaos deck. They are then revealed with relevant cards adding to the required total and other cards deducting from it. As cards are added in secret with some random ones thrown in, you never really if someone was trying to tank the skill check.

Step 4 – Discard

Each player, not just the active player, discards cards from their hand until they have 10.

Play continues clockwise.

Game End

The game ends immediately when any of the following conditions are met:

The ship has travelled a total distance of 12 or when the token hits the arrival space on the travel track the human loyal players win

If there are six damage cards on the ship at the same time the human loyal players lose. These can be repaired by the players on their turn.

If players must place Deep Ones on the board but can’t because the supply is empty, the human loyal players lose. This is why attacking them is important.

Finally, if at least one resource dial reaches 0, the human loyal players lose. Throughout the game, players are making choices that will spend and refill these dials. They represent Fuel, Food, Sanity and Souls which are the passengers you hopefully saved on your turn.

Theme

OK, so say Unfathomable wasn’t based on Battlestar Galactica I would enjoy the theme. I like the idea of trying to get a boat to survive a journey while being attacked by Deep Ones. It’s tense as these Pandemic-like games should be and it all works…

However, this is based on another game so there are a few things I can’t help but forget.

The travel track kinda works in Unfathomable but it was built for the Galactica building up to jump to get away from the Cylonsas it is in the TV show. Here, making it a spell that gets rid of the baddies works, but nowhere near as well. The Galactica had a timer that was ticking down before they could jump away so it made sense in the game.

Also, I know the hidden roles in games like this have been around a while in other games. But they made so much more sense in Battlestar. There, when players received additional role cards it’s because those on the Galactica didn’t know they were Cylons. Here, it just seems like a twist for twist’s sake, so unneeded and not worth it.

Setup

Lots of cards tokens and minis. There is a space for everything and everything goes in its space. There is a lot of sheets and cards, and player boards and things to put out there.

Components & Artwork

The components in Unfathomable are nice with a majority of them being very standard FFG.

The minis are nice, especially the large Mother Hydra and Father Dagon that look intimidating swimming alongside the ship. However, the minis being cardboard standees like Arkham Horror wouldn’t take anything away from the enjoyment but would reduce the cost.

Ease of Teaching

As with any traitor game, a traitor not confidant with the game or games, in general, can hurt the experience. But players can advise on options the player has and let them get on with things.

Cards in hand are an issue. You can’t really reveal them to players to ask for advice because you might submit one to a skill check later on.

Unfathomable Summary

Most of what I wanted to say I’ve already covered in the Theme and Components part of this review.

So if you liked Battlestar Galactica and not BECAUSE it was BSG then you’ll probably like this. If you’ve never played either game then give it a go.

Keep in mind you can win as the traitor by not doing anything bad and in the game I played, one human player was in the Brig FOR THE ENTIRE GAME!

But still, Unfathomable is a good game worth the time investment.

Jesta ThaRogue