 So I saw a bunch of people on Twitter just, you know, for a week or so, like saying something something Captain Sonar and they post a picture and the picture they always posted was the one I just pulled it right here and it shows like these little charge up dials and a picture for submarine. Well, my friend, my friend Chris who plays Netrunner is moving to Seattle, but is moving like on Wednesday and wasn't able to move before packs. He told me about Captain Sonar and I said that game sounds amazing and then we got to packs. There it was. So he played it at packs. And then just yesterday I was in the game store for a Netrunner tournament and I was telling, you know, we're just chatting it up before the tournament. And I said, yeah, this is great game. I played a packs Captain Sonar and everyone was like, Oh, that sounds awesome. And then I lost. So I had to buy in the round two. And then I walked around the store just looking around and there Captain Sonar was for 50 bucks. And I said, well, I could buy this and we can play it like right the fuck after this Netrunner tournament. Everybody as long as they get a room to pay for it, which I did because Scott said, Hey, they got it and I went on Amazon and it was $104 on Amazon is 50 bucks at the store and I had store credit. So I'll charge you slightly less because it's a used once copy of Amazon. Well, I didn't buy the Captain Sonar. I saw a fresh fish for $38 and I saw a deep sea adventure for like 11. So I bought both of those. But yeah, so Captain Sonar this game. So in the world of games that are co-op, right? We have a lot of problems. For example, we got pandemic where the pandemic problem is is just basically a backing. Yeah, it's it's a solid. It's a solitary game and you just happen to unofficially divide the work between four people and there isn't really any actual separation because you can share all the information. Yeah. And the rules are bullshit, whatever I'd be more fun. Yeah, we've talked about this. You've got the trader kind where it's bullshit because obvious who the trader isn't it then becomes pandemic. You've got the pandemic legacy. I guess slightly better than regular pandemic. I haven't played more a role playing game slash experience, which is fine. Like that's cool. The game puzzle solving part is not really able to think of the problem with those games. They don't have a lot of replay value by design. Yep. So you've got the beautiful Hanabi style where you're forced not to share information and it or there are strict rules around sharing information, which itself is the core of the game. Yes. You've got the real time kind, the space alert in the XCOM where the real time nature of it forces you to co-op because no one can do all that work in such a short amount of time. But that real time has to be facilitated by a third party, be it an app, a recording or a human. Yeah. You got the versus kind where there's a Dracula, right? If you're a Dracula where there's a person you're up against. So four people are co-oping against one person on teams, but Furry of Dracula has problems with the combat parts. Well, but that's a part is good. Yeah. And also that genre of like a bunch of people versus one person that's basically just facilitated gaming and it's actually that's really the same as hero quest in some ways. And that genre is fine. It's just any individual implementation of it might be good or bad, but Captain Sonar brings to the table something that is very rare, even with all the board games in the world. And that is team versus team, two teams going against each other, just like football or any other sport on for real time and the real time for on four and it's real time. But the thing is I heard that and I thought that's cool. But then when I was told that not only is a four and four real time, you do not need a facilitator. The game is self facilitating and there is no app or anything. Yep. It's just four on four. And that's it. And then I said, what the fuck? How do you do that? And that's because the people who made this game are brilliant. Let me tell you how this shit works. So first of all, you're paying 50 bucks and there's not a lot of stuff in the box. You can make this game. You don't need to buy it. Yes. However, I'd say buy it because like this game design is legit. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the game design is legit. Also, you really want to make like some sort of shield wall to separate four people from four other people. Never mind all the boards and all that stuff. Plus it comes with dry erase markers. They're nice. Even though they're shitty by replacements on Amazon. Figure out which ones are best on Amazon or reflect. Probably the ones you'd use in an overhead projector. Those kind. Yeah. That kind. Exactly. Yeah. You're writing on that transparency. If you're the radio. Exactly. So here's how this works. Each team of four is on a submarine in the water. There's some backstory. Whatever you don't like. You don't care about that. And you don't like each other. You have the same map. And you say the captains on each team say dive and you die. And then the game begins once everyone dives. And here's how it works. The captain chooses any starting location on the map. That's not on land because you're a fucking submarine. So both sides you're looking at this just map. Then you have on each team. You have the captain and the captain says head north or head east or head south or head west because the grid and the captain set when you move. You have to say it loud. So everyone hears right your team and the other team. So the person on the other team they don't know where you started but they know you just headed north. So on there is a radio operator and the radio operator. This is the this is what really makes the game. This is really the radio operators only job is to listen to the opponent's captain and draw a line north because he headed north and then draw a line east when they head east. So they know the path you took. So the radio operator is trying to figure out where the other cell is based on all this information. They're overhearing right and they're on all they do is solve the puzzle or figure it out and give the basically consult with the captain and be like captain. They're either here or here captain. I think they're going this way and the captain is synthesizing their information like Scott. Where do you think they are? I'm gonna start heading north. Cool. Yeah. And you're also working with engineering and all the other people. We'll talk about those people in a second. Yeah. But the radio operator has a transparency and a map. The captain has a map that they're just drawing on where they really literally are. You can play as fast as you want. I could be like head north head north head north head north head north head north. That's totally you all well until necessarily do that either because you can until no you can. So anyway the radio opera I played this game recently. Let me explain it because you don't know you don't know I read the rules. You didn't read the rule book actually did read the rules. Oh wow. Okay. Anyway the radio operator has a transparency in a map that it moved the transparency around. You also can't move and bump into your own trail. It's like Tron. You can't your motor say your submarine has a laser coming out the back that's creating a wall. You cannot bump into your own wall. You can bump into the other team's wall. Yeah. Because you don't even know you don't even know where it is. Can't bump into the wall can't bump into land. You can't go like you can't go east southwest north. That's an illegal move because you just bumped into yourself right your trail and you can surface and make it go away but whatever. That's not important. Surfacing is super fun. We'll talk about that in a bit. So then you've got the first mate. Now if you only have three on three the captain is also the first mate and what the first mate does every time they move they charge a system and a little bit and they can charge all these different systems that do different things. There's the sonar and drone systems that you can use to help find the opponent sub. Yeah. There's the silent running system. The silent system which lets you move secretly a number of spaces for and any of the four directions except for backwards because you that you'll bump into your own trail and there's the weapon systems the mine and the torpedo which you can charge up and there's an optional six thing for like that's only that's only on map five. Yep. The hardest map. There's a scenario thing that you charge up and use it does something special but what we didn't ever played with it. So I already read online a lot of people once they play the game a lot they make up their own things. You have to make up your own map because but basically you that's the spot where you can charge up something weird if you made a custom scenario. Also the map one is the only map I've played on and it's a baby map. We got to go to map B real quick. Yeah. Once you once you know how to play anyway the final person is the engineer and the engineer has this picture of the submarine kind of and there's a main circuit and there's a nuclear reactor and every time you move there's they have to cross off something on this sheet. Yeah shit breaks every time you move. So if you move north they have to pick something in the north rectangle and remove it either something in the reactor or something in the main circuit. And now let's say they remove like the weapon system in the north's area. Well you can't use your weapon systems. You get into situations where the captain is not paying attention. I'll be like halt fire torpedo and they're like nope. Now some of the things in the main circuit are connected to each other. So if you hit all four things that are connected to each other by a line they all clear. So you can go north north north east and those are all connected to each other. So if you do north north north east those all then get erased and now you're good to use some sort of equipment. Right. One of the things that the first mate is charging up. You can also clear off your reactor things but those are permanently removed until you surface. So good luck with that. And if you fuck up your subjects dam if you cross off every less your north area on your little sheet only has so many circle bits. If you cross all of them off a hundred percent you take damage and your submarine only has four hit points and can ever be healed. And the best part is the captain just gives orders. So if the captain says go north like once you say it and the second that says yeah after the captain says north south east or west both of the people next to him the engineer and the first mate have to say okay. If they don't say okay you didn't move yet really. And if they don't say okay you can't move again yet. Right. So if you're like head north and you don't hear two OK's then you didn't really move north and you'd not have to discuss with them. Why didn't we move north engineer. The engine's busted. We can't move north. You blew us up. We're dead. We got it. We can only move this direction. So you get a lot of chatter like I was the captain in the one game I played and I kept yelling engineering like hey how much leeway to heaven the east and they'd be like not a lot captain. What do you need me to do to heal stuff to go like this. As I'm looking at where Scott's telling me to go and I'm looking at where engineering is telling me to go the opposite directions. So every time I played I mean I'm going to go through all the rules of exactly how everything works but every time I played this so far which is three times it's everyone's sort of used the same strategy which I now only at the end of the third game I realized might not be the best strategy. I'm curious what you're going to say there because I came up with what I think is a decent strategy but also your strategies are different because on map a it's really easy to figure out where people are because there's so many islands on the harder maps is a lot less islands. It's a lot harder to they could be anywhere right. But basically we were playing such that we're moving fast as fast as we could because moving is the only way to charge stuff right charging all kinds of stuff up and then trying to use the sonar and drone systems to find the opponent. We found them easily because the map has a lot of islands on it. Yep and they're moving a lot when someone moves a lot it's easy to find them because they have a big old trail that only fits in certain places on the map. If they have a little trail it's hard. It could be anywhere. Well funny we both in the first game both selves kind of went near each other and tried to put mines in basically the same place. Yeah but mines don't set off when someone goes near them. They set off remote their remote triggered mines. The heck after it raises hand is like we're detonating the mine at this location. Are you near it. Yeah we're near it. Shit or no we're nowhere near there. Yeah and if you detonate it near yourself well. Yeah you can hurt yourself anyway. So yeah so we everyone moved fast found each other quickly and then it was pretty much just a race to see who could shoot the other submarine with torpedoes first and I've won all three games I've played but I think a better move is to move a little bit charge up some stuff and then just silent to sit there. Yeah put mines out you know and make sure these move slowly so they can't find you you know use silence a lot like drop a mine silence drop a mine silence and move a little bit and be really mysterious and stealthy and then like surface because they have no clue where you are so you can surface safely when you surface they know what sector you're in and then right after you're done surfacing silence move about right they can't you know and leave so many mines around right and then the radio operator will be like captain I think they're near one of our mines and set it off and this way you can't really get torpedoed it's hard for them to find you right and you just make yours your sub harder to find than their sub but then even if they do the same thing as you you just had to do it better but then you do run the risk because if you're moving more slowly meaning you have more time to consult and like come up with the strategy the other sub has the exact same opportunity now yep if you suddenly start moving fast they got to keep up like if you're the radio operator and you like you flub it or you fuck it up your subs in a lot of trouble now maybe maybe not you know even if you fuck up a little bit usually you can get still really figure out where they are and get there's one mechanic that I think is super fun where if you surface the there's a task you have to do the rule for yourself all right this is cool pencils down yeah so if scots the radio operator and I surface as the captain the other subs moving and scots not allowed to write anything down I thought you are allowed to keep tracking you can listen to it but his pencils down I didn't read that in the rule book that's how the facilitator who taught us the game was very specific everyone has to put their pencil down until everyone completes their task I don't remember I've never put my pencil down while the except for while doing the thing anyway so when you surface the engineer takes on their sheet at the top is a picture of a submarine with four sections and that each section has a white outline and you have to draw in that white outline without touching the edges without touching the edges sort of like you know one of those games where you have like a metal ring on a stick and you're trying to move it around the wire without touching the wire yeah and then you initial it and your whole team has to initial a section each if you have three players someone does two sections then you show this to the enemy engineer they look at it and verify it that you did it properly without messing up and if they say you did a good job because they shouldn't be assholes and say you did a bad job when you didn't actually mess up then they say okay and now you can say dive and play again yep but the other sub can keep doing stuff while you finish unless they're also trying to surface but yeah and they know what sec you have to announce what sector you're servicing in but you don't announce your exact location so it's not like you're just dead plus you hopefully do this when they're far away and can't really do anything to you observe it like in the first game we played the other sub was forced to surface because they had a bunch of breakdown well it's like they can't you can't go back on your snake right so let's say for example you go like southeast southwest now you can't go north and you can't go east and maybe there's an island to your south you can only go west again but maybe you're out of west so your choice is to go west and damage yourself or surface right and maybe you already have three damage you can't go west and damage yourself you have to surface servicing cannot use their pens for anything that's new that's new okay so so when i played it the first time well because you are doing the radio operators because i kept radio operating when we were certain that you're cheating then oh no wait we didn't surface ever yeah we never surface or fine oh but yesterday when we played yeah so they surface and i looked at my engineer because they'd play the game a bunch already and i was like should we go for it and they were like go and i was like north north east we're just like moved as fast as we could to charge it torpedo you only need three movements so we went move move move shoot move move shoot done because we move a whole it only hurt them because we knew exactly the spot they were on we had shot them then they started servicing then we just went move move shoot and they were dead yeah we moved as fast as we could but they didn't want to surface they had no choice you want to surface when no one can know where you are yep exactly for if the other ones also surfaced then i guess you can get away with it for a little while i think they really the only flaw in this game is that i think it can be fucked up you can get it messed up if like you can't you know some sort of miscommunications or right because no one's like watching you and verifying you only charge the right number of like you could just cheat but a clever person would notice right and the game really requires everyone to be in the spirit of let's not cheat right and you know you can't like just saying know when they drew the outline properly yeah stuff like that uh you know but it's like if you're going fast there's a lot of opportunity for mistakes you need a lot of discipline and i think the way i would get around that is irrespective of how the rules are actually written when i teach it to people i'm gonna come i'm gonna use a very specific lexicon and require it of everyone just to make it clear and i think it's something like when the caven wants to move they have to say like set a course north no it actually says in the rule book you have to say head north head north that's what it says in the rule book yeah i'm saying you must say it enough i think head is enough you just don't say it more than once and the other people have to say the rule book is very explicit about this we just weren't told that the one time we played at packs i read the rule book yesterday it's very explicit you must say head north if you just say north then it doesn't mean shit you have to say head north yeah and your engineer and first mate have to say okay otherwise you didn't move anywhere all right that's it's super explicit you don't need to but what he also said well to me after we're talking about the game because actually i told him my idea of say set a course instead and he said that's way better because he said that they ran into that problem a lot yeah because they didn't tell people to say head they said just people we were just playing like north north east no one said there was any problem with that partly because a lot of the people who played were kind of mumbling nerds that's also a problem you have to be loud and clear but the other suggestion that he had that he said worked really well if you didn't want to make it a longer phrase to make it very explicit was to have a rule just tell the group the captain has to look at the radio operator and like point at them or make some gesture when they say it yeah you know something whatever you can do right it doesn't really matter and just be as long as you're a hundred percent consistent then the other team has no excuse it effectively doesn't matter but the rule book isn't flawed the rule book is very explicit so the rule book is fine and you know just had to be absolutely clear of when you move and versus when someone is just like saying the word north for some other reason because they're discussing where should we move like should we move west yeah i think we should move west if the other team accidentally thinks you moved west now another guy i was talking to in the room after we played the first time they were at packs they were they were talking to how in a previous game the other sub stopped moving and the captain started talking to the radio operator about a plan so he just jotted down their plan because he was listening as the radio operator right no see i mean so that's when you play the game the first few times right you're playing a busy baby mode but you're not actually playing baby mode rules other than the other than the math yeah don't play the baby actual baby mode everyone says it's the turn-based mode doesn't exist yep don't look on the other side of your map the turn-based mode is nothing there it's like that cd in dnd third edition when it came out when we played basically if the radio operators like got something wrong on the path we would stop and like have the captain like reiterate the path they took so that they could correct the radio operators map right but in reality when you play this game for serious with eight people who know what they're doing you don't do that shit right the radio operator is your role playing the existence of like a real radio system you're under stress if the other teams moving fast and the captain's yelling at you you like miss an order and well that sucks right or like you know a radio isn't always loud and clear right you might not know you know get everything coming in clearly right when you're put your pencil down to surface you might not remember everything so you're you know you have to find them despite the radio not being perfect yeah and that aspect of it actually the radio operator you have to find but you have to find a balance between it's bullshit you were being quiet we couldn't hear you you're just trying to scam the radio operator and no we're actually don't want this to absolutely be perfect which is should be some noise on an interference on the radio jamming and whatnot but it's easily solved by following the rules explicitly and you know loud and clear voice and use the specific terminology that is required of you for your role the flaw in this game is it's hard to get eight confident people in one place who are dedicated and well if you get those eight people why are you playing a tabletop RPG you can get away with well one this takes way less time than tabletop RPG it does and it takes less preparation but and you still need eight quality the four rolls right the radio operator is the hardest and the most stressful they can't do anything else yeah the captain is the second hardest because you might just kill everybody like it's your fault if you mess up the other two roles are way easier they're still fun they're like they're not like the game is set up to wherever say you played a bunch of first mate is definitely the easiest job because all the first mate does is basically charge up systems but the first mate i think the reason that the first mate exists and has such a simple job is that they can do a lot of the thinking right there's a it's part of the role playing far is you know of actually being in the submarine captain were minds are charged right the place them somewhere right the first mate advises the captain and like thinks you know because you need the captain is so harried dealing with all this shit coming right at them that you need that one job that's light so that that person can sort of you know help with you know what's going on in fact in our game our my first mate was actually consulting with engineering and then he was actually talking to me so engineering didn't talk to me except when i gave all you know head north okay yeah because otherwise he was dealing with his own shit of trying to figure out a course so they would like they they worked out a system with it but since this game is real time there is no requirement whatsoever for the pace at which you move you could just not move and just like get up get with your team and put your heads together and huddle and discuss things for like minutes if you want and then suddenly the like you say both subs are quietly like remember i mean you're one subs like head north and then all shit breaks out right it's like suddenly you have to pay attention to them yeah like you might just be quietly discussing things and not even moving and then the other team is like stop because whenever you use an ability if to stop the game i think you say halt yeah you say stop halt whatever and then they're like stop we're firing a torpedo at i nine and it's like oh shit how did you know we didn't even move how did you know but because there's there's sort of four levels of roles to stressful ones and to much less stress like way less stressful the engineering one is slightly stressful yeah well especially because the captain might not listen to you if you're like captain we can't go east anymore and the captain is like head east again you're like well the first mate is the easy job yeah but it's good because say you play the game three times in a row like you're at it you're like hanging out change change up the roles change up yeah because after if you do the captain and then the radio operator your brain needs a break like this game is like i'm not kidding you don't want to be a radio operator again you just want to go be the first mate i would not want to be the captain two times in a row that shit is real hard yep but yeah if you got if you're the kind of person who plays tabletop games has a big enough table and has eight people this is a must buy game even at the retail price of fifty dollars if you are a gaming a tabletop gaming convention if you are a convention or a library of games this is a must get game in your library if you're a if you go to meetups right you know it must get games this is a game where i think most people will only experience it at convention like you go to packs someone comes over to the table and says hey we're playing this i got it from the library yep i'd like to play it like you know and more harder maps and you know what i'd like to do is time on it this should be the first round of the megathon finale of packs or the megathon at packs east yeah you could have a bunch of games and just all the winning teams continue all the losing because you can divide any multiple of four people in half by using this game and because the game mechanics are so streamlined and simple the game is ripe for modding like if you play this game to the point that like you've all memorized the engineering so you know movement patterns to clear stuff and you're like super a game just modify it because it doesn't matter it's not like a secret you just both teams agree like let's make up a mod you make a mod you do something with the scenario and then you just play that map i mean you just make new maps really and that that makes it exciting enough just changing the map like make a map where there's a nuke or something or a mission you could make a bigger map you could make a smaller map you could make you know something else you could even use this say you're if you were playing like a naval rpg or some nonsense there's a map as a sub game there's a map that comes with it that where all the water is ice and you can only surface in certain parts and if you surface under the ice and smash into it you take damage yeah right it's like you just come up with something like that like oh there's a you know everyone has a boat that also what you can just go crazy or you've both got intelligence you've got to get to a port on the opposite side yeah sure whatever yeah but that would be you can't i don't think you have a victory condition besides finding the other sub because i think yeah i think you could and you just go to the other side and win like all right game over yeah but maybe yeah so i know they're doing that so i i go over to the other side like there's one port on a square and i put a mind how do you know that yeah well how do you know when they're there it's like you know well i hear i'm moving if one mind doesn't kill him either yeah i'm there to rely on you to wait i think you have to always the objective always has to be but i'm saying there are ways to play this game once you've played it out you can just mod it forever because this is going to have expansions for sure yeah the expansion is going to come with like more boards yeah like replacement boards and all sorts of stuff it's definitely coming this was probably the most surprising game to me at all of packs the thing is you're spending 50 bucks though for a bunch of cardboard boards that are really thin and you can dry erase on them two transparency sheets some thick boards that just have sort of artwork on them that used to separate your team from the other team yep and a pile of crappy dry erase markers that the razors built in that are really shitty but they get the job done that's all you're getting in and the rulebook that's all you're getting you're not getting anything else in this box which like i said i'm fine with in this case it's a really big box to rebox this shit yeah we well the funny is this packs for whatever reason it packs west we played a lot of co-oppy games and a lot of shared space games like way more than ever this was one of many and we'll be talking about him but this one this was my favorite game i had not yet played at packs and the thing is my second favorite one is deep-sea adventure which is also about a submarine but it's not co-oppy no it well it's it's uh it's infiltration it's infiltration light yeah it's the opposite of co-op competitive no but you share a space and you're just fucking each other in that space i mean you share a space in t&e and you're fucking each other in that space yeah but this one you're sharing oxygen and if you go deep share that game we'll talk about in a future show it's super good it's super cheap so everyone with friends get captain sonar everyone without friends who can't play captain sonar cry i am definitely bringing captain sonar to magfest oh yeah yeah oh yeah it might be the only captain sonar at magfest yeah that magfest especially because we have the suite we're gonna play a lot of captain sonar i think at magfest once people know how to play it like i can walk away and they'll just play it i think it'll be continued i don't want to walk away i want people to play as i can play it i think we're gonna have more than eight people who want to play it well that's their problem we go scott we got to form the all pro team at magfest oh oh you want to make a submarine that's like an invincible submarine that's like me you two smart people yeah like me you alex p like that's unbeatable that's a maybe scott johnson could be good too uh maybe i think it'd be good you're about to disparage scott johnson i mean the thing is while scott johnson might be okay this game especially if this team scott uh how fun would it be to blow up the submarine with captain scott johnson on it yeah yeah that's something we want to do you know what he does in overwatch so if someone's in a group like you can join like we can group up and join games together but say someone else is already in a group or already in a game you can just join that game as a spectator and in the next game or when someone quits it puts you on the opposite side so you can see scott johnson playing and join his game and kill him uh huh it's he's been doing that a lot and it's really funny like i'll be playing and suddenly i get killed by scott i'm like scott's in this game you son of a bitch this has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to dj pretzel for the opening music cat lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one but four different shows side tech mondays gaming tuesdays anime comic wednesdays and indiscriminate thursdays geek nights is distributed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience but unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night