The 7th Continent is “a solo or cooperative ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ exploration board game,” in which you play a cursed explorer returning to the eponymous continent. It is a game of exploration and survival. It is expensive and comes in a big box with 1000 cards. If you want to know more, you could look at the original Kickstarter campaign. I backed the expansion Kickstarter campaign after hearing good reviews of the original.
This is the first time I have ever sleeved a game. That seemed like a good idea for a game that is expensive and not found in stores. In retrospect, that was probably overkill; sleeving the commonly used cards (a few hundred) makes more sense, although this provides protection against beverages and casual damage. As I mentioned, this is not as easy to replace as a set of Dominion cards. Even more than just seeing the stacks of cards, you get a sense of how many cards 962 really is when you sleeve every one of them.
My first impression while playing was “why is this not a computer game?” The mechanics are something that computers do well. The “choose your own adventure” approach is something known well in computer games, a solved problem. Making it a game rather than a “choose your own adventure” book adds gameplay mechanics, but replicating that with cards is unnecessarily complicated. It is really neat, but it seems like an expensive luxury. It is an $80 board game that could be a $20 computer game. The way that the cards work is neat, but doing this with cards seems like a lot of effort just to do it with cards. And I love me some cards, but I also like offloading mechanics on computers.
The mechanics really are not that complicated. But your first playthrough has that effect where you check the rules more or less every turn, which slows things to a crawl. Every terrain card has multiple things going on, and some of those “things” also have several things going on, so it takes an hour for a new player to explore the first island even though it is very small. You feel like you have gone through a lot, and you also feel like you have played through four cards in an hour.
My other big impression is that the game has limited replayability because of the exploration factor. Like going through a deterministic computer game or a real “choose your own adventure” book, once you have gone through it, you have gone through it. Card 10 will still be card 10 if you play again. There will be differences based on other cards that randomize and which skills and items you have available, so your path will differ, but once you have seen something you have seen it. If you have a good memory, you are following the path from before, using physical cards for the equivalent of “click everything once to see what happens,” minus skipping purely negative things from your previous run(s). Most things I have encountered so far could be variably good, but a few are just unambiguously bad, and the only variation is how badly you are hurt for checking all the options on a card. Something feels wrong about going through a game and just knowing “that’s a trap, avoid it entirely,” although the game is almost certainly balanced around a bit of that expectation.
That presents a different question of longevity and replayability. When it takes multiple hours to play the game (5-12 for a first playthrough? I haven’t logged that many hours yet), and there is a permadeath mechanic, some of the longevity comes from failing and starting those hours over. I am not saying that the game should be a cakewalk with a guaranteed victory your first time through, but there may be grumbling about “thanks for playing for six hours, everyone dies, want to play again?” And if that is how you get 20 hours of play from the first curse, because it took you a few tries, that’s … suboptimal, especially if the early game is known and the first hour is just going through the motions and seeing what items you have this time. Plus spoilers you have in your head or on the team.
So far, not a great return on investment in terms of gameplay. It has been okay but clunky doing all of this with cards, combined with an aura of doom because you don’t expect to win your first time out. The journey had better be worth it considering the time and cost involved. The game and word of mouth suggest that I should keep going, see how the first playthrough goes as I get closer to the end and get quicker with the rules, and write up some second impressions. Not yet impressed.
The game has a save state “just like in a video game” that lets you pause between play sessions, because few people play for 5-12 hours at a time. I paused at a point where that looks exploitable, so I can keep refreshing a fishing card to refill my action deck. The game mechanics seem to encourage this, while the spirit of the game seems to push against it. I perhaps should not be happy that I was attacked by a bear while fishing, but it was really helpful because bears have a lot of meat.
: Zubon