The 7th Continent

Publisher: Serious Poulp

Designer: Bruno Sautter and Ludovic Roudy

Players: 1-4

Time: 10-1,000 minutes (not a typo!)

The last time you visited the 7th Continent you were cursed when you left. You have to return to this mysterious island and break the curse that has fallen upon you only to have another curse when you leave the Island again??? As an adventure in the early 20th century, you and your team will challenge yourselves and try to survive the elements to cleanse your human forms.

This is a co-operative game for you to explore the Continent at your own leisure…..but don’t be fooled, there is a timer on this curse, so make haste.

There really is no set phase in which you need to go through during your play of 7th Continent. As a group you decide what to do and when to do it. One person could play their character for 20 actions in a row if they wanted to….ignoring the rest of the group. But that wouldn’t be fun.

The whole premise of this game is the deck of cards that begins your journey….this is the timer for the curse. There are a number of cards in the deck along with 4 curse cards….once you go through the deck once that’s fine, reshuffle and get back at it….BUT the second time you go through….the FIRST curse card you run into…kills you and the game is over. But when you discard cards, that doesn’t mean their gone, when you “eat” in the game, you get to take a certain number of cards from the discard pile and shuffle them back into the main deck…..extending your time.

How do you go through your deck you ask? By doing tests….

Every time you want to do something whether it be more to an area, you draw a card. See whats in the mountains, do a test. When you do a test it will say you need to draw X amount of cards and get X amount of successes. Each card will have, anywhere between 0 and 2 stars on it. There are even half stars. You get a full star and it is one success. So, the more cards you draw the better chance of getting more completed stars. There is even a handy possibility chart in the game that tells you what the likely hood of you drawing 2 Stars with only 3 Cards.

You can literally go and do anything you want. You need to gather resources to build the items you get from your cards that will help you along your journey but the sky is the limit. Just you and your group hanging out trying to lift the curse.

Positives

Completely open world exploration. I simply want to go somewhere and I go. I want someone else to go while I weigh my choices….fine. I want to skip that test and decide to go somewhere else…done.
Replayability is so high on this one. There are 8 different curses and over 600 different different cards in the game. There is so much to do it makes me laugh.
Story driven and thematically brilliant. It is the best representation of an open world video game I have ever played. I can imagine this world that I am in, going around and not knowing what I will find. Crafting items and trying to survive. The game Don’t Stave comes to mind.
Deck timing mechanism is fantastic and adds such a great sense of urgency and tension.

Neutrals

Price!!! It’s expensive….over 100$ and it is only being available on Kickstarter. I missed out on the first one so I will have to get with this upcoming one but that is kinda pricey for a card game.

Negatives

NONE

Final Thoughts

I can not get this one fast enough. If it were for sale at Gen Con, it would have been in my hands, minute one. I love this game. It is such a new feel to a co-op that isn’t your average, must stop this onslaught of bad stuff or must defend this place. It was so fun. I only played about 20 minutes worth but I will never forget the time when one of my team members went over to inspect a dead seagull only to get a blast of hot air from a geyser in his face. Or the time when one of us went to see a creature in the ocean only to find a dead body in the water with eggs embedded in his skin. This will be a Kickstarter purchase without question….if I can’t pry it from someones lifeless hands first.