7th Continent: adventure gaming at its best

I FINALLY had a chance to break out my copy of 7th Continent yesterday. I had it with, it wasn't in my plan to play it, but hey, it won't get played if it's not there. But the friend I met with had been advised we play it, so...(pics will be from BGG)

Yeah this is a really good game. As far as theme, think of it as a coop based on the choose your own adventure books. Only the game isn't one story, it has a few. And there are a lot of variables within the game. Some of this depends on action efficiency, some on timing. A lot of it depends on the cards in the action deck. Or lack thereof.

First things, though: if you haven't seen this game, it has a lot of cards. So if you order it in the future, be prepared to sort for awhile before you play. It took the two of us a couple of hours in a previous time to get the cards all sorted.  Here's one of all the cards:

Anyway, back to the game premise. You and your fellow adventurers(early 1900's) recently came back from an expedition to a newly found land. Unfortunately, you all are cursed, and have to go back to lift the curse. Each curse is tied to a specific starting point, and there's four generic curses added to the action deck as well. I'll talk about that soon.(You can start with multiple curses, but I wouldn't until you've beaten a couple first.)

The map building is very specific, as the art forms a very coherent map. After exploration actions, that is. Unexplored cards are marked with explore cards of a certain type indicated on the map.

From there, you explore and build up a map. But, you won't ever see everything. Seriously. The estimated time for all the content in the box is something along the lines of 1500 minutes. That is not for a game, that's to see EVERYTHING, requiring many games, even with the same curse. Eventually you develop a map that might look like this:

More or less. I haven't been there yet. We played for about 3.5 hours, and got off our initial island. Our action deck had run out, and then, after a little exploration and actions, the curse struck its final blow.

Now, the action deck. There's a default set of basic skill cards, plus a set of five for each character that are added to the game. The action deck is shared. Every action has a cost and a requirement for success.  Once the action deck has run out, the discard pile is shuffled and replaced in the discard tray face down to draw for each action. If at this point a curse is revealed, the game is lost. Here's the official basics video, it includes a save demonstration:

Anyway, there's a lot here, and it has an easy save mode with no need for notes or remembering what you were doing. Also, given the join/drop rules, I have to say, in a lot of ways this fills the rpg spot quite well. Exploration, puzzles, and so on.

When you play Social Justice, the world loses.