This review was originally posted at Player Elimination, my weekly board game editorial site.
You couldn’t miss it. As I walked up to my front porch, slouched and tired from not enough sleep and more than enough work, the large package was sitting there. This isn’t an unusual sight as cardboard shipping boxes containing cardboard gaming boxes arrive weekly at my suburban dwelling. This one was different because it was unexpected.
I hurried inside lifting with my legs instead of my back, and laid the thing out on my dining room table with a pietistic moment of silence.
A careful slice of the knife and there it was, that sleek black and gold cover staring me in the eyes with all the atmosphere of an <PERSON> directed game of chess.
This happens often. I toss a wad of cash into the pot of a Kickstarter campaign and several years later a game arrives unexpectedly. It’s like a subscription box that delivers once a year and takes your arm as recompense.
You may have heard of the 7th Continent (cue church bells, doves, and <PERSON>). It raised eight million dollars over two crowdfunding campaigns and has received much acclaim. As an experience it abandons players on an island and has you working together to lift a cryptic curse. And everyone absolutely loves it.
For good reason too. In many respects this is the ultimate exploration game as you cut through jungle, stumble through snow, and snarl in the face of the weirdest of beings. It’s captivating and overwhelming in the sheer amount of content you can discover over the course of play. One could literally set fire to the rest of their collection and dedicate themselves to the 7th Continent for the rest of the year. Probably the rest of all of your years.
Although I don’t actually recommend that.
[record scratch]
Never have I so thoroughly committed myself to a game and felt so conflicted. This monstrosity in a box has provided me with double digit hours of wonderful discovery and adventure. It’s provided some really standup moments of shock and it continually surprised me with the elegance of its core ‘push your luck’ mechanism. In short, it’s a beautiful piece of design and an unparalleled experience – for 12 hours or so.
The 7th Continent thematically exists as a sort of heartbreak simulator. It accomplishes what Fog of Love couldn’t in that it presents a genuine emotional journey of courtship, love, consummation of that love, comfort, annoyance, aggravation, hate, and eventually divorce. 504
Yeah, that’s quite a bit of steps to unpack and work through. Relationships are complicated, yo.
The problem with a design predicated on exploration is that you need something to explore, something that will eventually be fully discovered and lose its purpose. Think about that for a moment. When the premise of your creation’s fun is in the process of discovery, the lifespan is outright limited. You’re working towards something, and that something is likely an unsatisfied ending. The damn finish line is the knife that’s going to kill you, not the 20 mile long trek.
People like to throw around that special phrase ‘it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey’. Usually to sort of couch disappointment in a revelation that’s not up to snuff. I watched Lost, I know disappointment.
The 7th Continent’s solution for this problem of terminus is to throw it all at you. Not just the kitchen sink, but the loofah, the hand towel, the tiles, and even the blackened grout between them. What feels like the entire run of Dominion, Legendary, and Thunderstone is all crammed into a single box where you must meticulously curate and file each card so as to make retrieval during play minimally painful. By giving you so damn much to explore and wade through, you’ll never hit that unsatisfying end-of-the-line where you look back and question your life choices – at least that’s the theory. And while everything is fresh and exciting, that pain of leafing through cards and maintaining a perfectly organized library will be subdued and easily covered up. Eventually fresh and exciting turns to rote and monotonous, end of the journey or not.
The island feels enormous in the early days. You’ll push through alien territory and encounter bizarre vegetation and bizarre-er lifeforms. You’ll hit breathtaking pieces of geography and your mind will race with possibility. It all feels so damn wide open and refreshingly free. You can do whatever you want and go wherever you’d like.
That’s the premise at least. 558