Oh, Captain! My Captain!

Cooperative board games have enjoyed a bit of an uptick among my circle of friends. But as we try more of them, the ones we play need to pack a bit more punch to stay in the mix at our gaming table. One game that may come up short is The Captain Is Dead.

Players are all crew members of a futuristic starship -- mostly evocative of Star Trek, but with perhaps a few other sci-fi tropes stirred in. As the title succinctly puts it, your captain is dead. But that's hardly the worst of your problems. Alien ships are attacking outside as their soldiers board your ship for hand to hand combat. As interstellar phenomena drift by, they're causing malfunctions all over your ship. Oh, and the engines are offline. But if you can get them working and jump to light speed, you'll leave all these troubles behind (and win the game).

The Captain Is Dead does have some things going for it. Its icon-driven system for addressing the various crises thrown at the players is easy to grasp. There's a bit more too it than that, but the upshot of it is that the game is fairly simple to teach compared to some cooperative games. Each player takes a character, each having both a special power and a favored icon type -- more than enough to give you something you are good at and that the other players may not be. This sort of specialization allows everyone to work toward the victory, and helps the group "divide and conquer." Also, the game purports to take up to 7 players; we haven't put that to the test, but if that works smoothly, that definitely sets the game apart from other cooperative games (most of which are limited to 4 or 5).

But for my tastes, the game was too reactive. It tosses problems at you with little or no warning, and gives you very few tools to look ahead. You may know which player's character is good at a particular problem, but that doesn't mean you'll have them in the right place at the right time. You can't easily plan good moves in advance, or take precautions against possible disasters. You're mostly just running around the board, putting out fires. Sometimes, there are enough fires going that you do make strategic choices in who you send where, but that isn't generally as satisfying as proactive planning. To a large extent, the game plays you.

There's a fair amount of variance in the mix here that could make future playthroughs very different. Each of the 7 player colors has multiple characters you can play, each with a different power. Then there's the randomness inherent in this sort of "avert disaster" cooperative game. It's not supposed to be easy to win. So I suppose I'd be open to trying it again some time and seeing if we get better results.

And yet, the game didn't make enough of an impression on me that I'd necessarily want to try it again when there are so many others in our library to be played. I might have rated the game a B- shortly after we played it, but the fact that it hasn't come back to the table in a while now makes me feel like a C+ might be a more accurate mark. I'd certainly welcome a second opinion from those who have played it more and think more highly of it, though I wouldn't recommend anyone pick up a copy just to give me that second opinion.