Ted Olsen - Dec 24, 2016 3:00 pm UTC
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Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games. Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.
The greatest temptation when playing Captain Sonar doesn’t come during the game itself. It comes when you’re trying to find another seven people to play. You’ll want to call this a party game version of Battleship—and that’s an apt description. Like the best party games, Captain Sonar features a wonderful mix of yelling, cooperation, deception, role-playing, deduction, and speed. And, like Battleship, you put your naval vessel on a grid and hope the other team doesn’t luck into finding it.
But don’t fall into the temptation. Nobody wants to play a group variant of Battleship any more than they want to play a group variant of Candyland. Instead, tell people that Captain Sonar is a great submarine-themed party game. Gamers will go in thinking of Subterfuge. Gen-Xers will launch into their worst impression of Sean Connery’s “Russian” accent in The Hunt for Red October. That one guy in every game group will start arguing that Kelsey Grammer’s 1996 Down Periscope was superior to Das Boot.
Allow this. It will give you the 30 seconds you need to set up this simple but brilliant game of “hide and seek and blow up.”
Battle stations
Captain Sonar is designed for two teams of four, sitting directly across from each other and separated by the game’s most significant components: two humongous cardboard screens. The screens are just long enough to accommodate four adults on each side but short enough that you’ll have to squeeze together—the tight quarters were perhaps designed to contribute to the submarine theme.
Teams are divided into four roles, each armed with only a dry erase marker and a special laminated sheet. The captain’s job is in some ways the easiest: the main task is just to move the sub around your mapped grid of dots, avoiding islands and disguising your location and path as best you can. On each move, you have to announce the direction journeyed (north, east, south, west) but not your location.
There’s one major complication: you can never cross over your sub’s path. My fellow players wondered why the game is set in the year 2048, since it has no real futuristic aspect. The best I could come up with is that it explains the path-crossing rule. In the future, subs can be operated by a crew of four but run on whatever powered Tron’s light cycles.
The captain would be unwise to chart a course without listening to his crew, however. The engineer’s pleas are probably the most urgent. Subs of the future are surprisingly flimsy. With each movement, the engineer “tracks a breakdown.” If the sub moves north, for example, the engineer must mark off one of five or six symbols in the “north” quadrant on his sheet. Cross out all five symbols in one quadrant and your sub takes a hit of damage. You sink at a mere four hits, so heading in one direction for too long can be a costly decision.
Even worse, any time you mark a symbol, you render one of your sub’s systems inoperable. Cross off just one of the six weapons icons and you’ve lost the ability to fire torpedoes or drop mines. Cross off a sonar symbol and you’ve made it much harder to find your opponent. A limited number of radiation symbols won’t damage systems—but cross all of them out and you suffer some sort of Spock-like radiation incident and take a hit of damage.
Fortunately, there are two ways to repair your damage—which is to say you get to erase your engineering marks. Most of the damage symbols are connected by a “circuit;” three icons in the west quadrant connect to one in the east quadrant, for example. Cross out all four and they become completely healthy again. (I’m less mechanically oriented than the typical Ars reader, but I’m pretty sure this means that circuits work differently in 2048 than they do in 2016.)
You can also erase all of the marks on the engineer’s slate by convincing the captain to surface the submarine. The captain may very much like this idea because he will get to erase that uncrossable Snake-like line he’s been drawing on his map with each move. But it’s a risky decision, too, since surfacing allows the other team to take several additional moves.
The first mate is essentially the reverse of the engineer. She’s eager to make marks on her page, since these bring various systems online. Unlike the engineer, the first mate’s marks don’t have to directly correspond to the direction the submarine is heading. Two moves could ready a mine. Three might ready a torpedo. With five, you could prepare “silent” mode, which lets the captain move the sub up to four spaces in any one direction—without having to announce to the other team which direction it was. Location devices (sonar, drones) also force the other team to give you clues about where their sub might be.
The trick, of course, is that the first mate can’t actually use any of those great tools if the engineer has crossed off even one of the corresponding symbols on his own sheet. So the captain, first mate, and engineer must together chart a course that will keep certain systems online without sending the sub into the rocks—and without giving away the sub’s position by too obviously avoiding those rocks.
And that’s where the radio operator comes in. The radio operator’s sole job is to listen to the opposing team’s captain and chart enemy sub movements on a clear sheet of plastic that overlays the map. After 10 moves or so, the radio operator should be able to deduce the opposing sub’s location by shifting this overlay around. A few sonar or drone maneuvers (or a few bad moves by the opposing captain) will narrow the location down even faster.
The radio operator is essentially the goalie, focused more on the other team’s moves than on your own, and any mistakes here are costlier. The engineer crossed off a symbol, thereby disabling a system the first mate was hoping to use? No worries. It’s fixable in a couple more moves or by surfacing. But if the radio operator marks “east” when the opposing captain actually goes “west” (as happened in one of my games)? Or misses a move altogether? The mistake might not be clear until after your boat sinks, and there’s not much team members can do to mitigate the problem.
That’s basically the game. Find the other sub. Shoot them with torpedoes or drive them near your mines. The first sub to four damage points loses. It’s delightfully stressful and loads of fun even in that first learning game. Five different maps, several with slightly different rules, keep the game unpredictable and challenging (in an arctic map, for example, you’ll suffer damage for surfacing except at a few scarce open water holes).
But once eight people have the hang of the game, it turns on its head and gets really fun.