Way back in 2008, Fantasy Flight Games released a boardgame based on the reboot of BattleStar Galactica. The game was a co-op survival/crisis management affair with a traitor mechanic. Everyone was meant to work together in order to reach Earth and avoid Cylons, but at least one of your was secretly working against you. Unfathomable is a re-working and re-skinning of this long out of print game.
The theme has shifted from desperate humans on a space-ship to the crew and passengers on a steamship. Set in 1913, the ship is slowly chugging its way across the Atlantic toward Boston. Alas, ancient sea monsters have set their sights on the ship and the passengers. Fans of the Cthulhu Mythos or FFG’s Arkham games will recognise the monsters; they’re deep ones, those hideous horrors from the sea who can infiltrate and control society. Or to put another way, one of the characters in this game secretly has gills.
Game play is pretty simple; every round a crisis is happening. Maybe the engine is failing or supplies or low. Each character can provide some help to fix this via skill-cards. If enough of the right sort of cards go in, the players become closer to winning. If not, bad things happen. Unfathomable streamlines the original game some what. One of the trickier elements of BattleStar was the space battle sequence, it seemed both exciting and yet removed from the core game. In the new game, this is replaced by sea-monsters crawling onto the deck and characters having to fend them off, which is just a bit more satisfying.
The re-design has also streamlined the look of the game; it’s much easier to see what’s going on at a glance. The monster models look great and the graphics are appropriately themed. An effort has been made to make it brighter and more accessible, whilst still keeping with the horror theme. The game is still quite dense in terms of information (there’s a lot going on every round), so younger players should be encouraged to take a moment. The new design does what it can to make this easier, but it’s still quite an involved game.
Also all the characters here are original to the game, which means no one is at a disadvantage if they aren’t familiar with the Cthulhu Mythos. The previous version of this game featured characters who are traitors in the show and though that didn’t guarantee they’d be a traitor in the game (it’s random), it often meant that player was at a disadvantage.
This is still a social deduction game and that does mean that players can get loud. If you someone in your regular gaming group (or family) likes to take charge, you need to stop them from doing that quickly, as the point of the game is that one of you is a traitor and one of the better tactics is for the traitor to take charge early. The game will take somewhere between 2 to 4 hours, depending on your players and experience; it’s a full experience.
Unfathomable is a welcome return of a classic game. Though not recommended for groups new to board games, it’s a perfect way to step up to more involved and complex games.
