Lee, Richard and Steve played three player game and found that it was a bit more challenging than a six player game when it came successfully completing tasks by laying down cards. In the end Richard that fishy character won the game by having the ship completely break down due to mechanical issues.
The year is 1913. The steamship SS Atlantica is two days out from port on its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Its unsuspecting passengers fully anticipated a calm journey to Boston, Massachusetts, with nothing out of the ordinary to look forward to. However, strange nightmares plague the minds of the people aboard the ship every night; rumors circulate of dark shapes following closely behind the ship just beneath the waves; and tensions rise when a body is discovered in the ship’s chapel, signs of a strange ritual littered around the corpse.
Lurking within the depths of the Atlantic Ocean are a swarm of vicious, unspeakable horrors: the Deep Ones, led by Mother Hydra and Father Dagon. For reasons unknown, they have set their sights on the Atlantica, and their minions, taking the form of human-Deep One hybrids, have infiltrated the steamship to help sink it from within. Each game of Unfathomable has one or more players assuming the role of one of these hybrids, and how well they can secretly sabotage the efforts of the other players might mean the difference between a successful voyage and a sunken ship.
If you’re a human, you need to fend off Deep Ones, prevent the Atlantica from taking too much damage, and carefully manage the ship’s four crucial resources if you want any hope of making it to Boston, all while trying to figure out which of your fellow players are friends and which are foes. Everyone shares the same resource pool, but humans will try to preserve them while traitors will strive to subtly deplete them. Being able to tell when someone is purposefully draining the group’s resources is harder than you think, especially when you take crises into account!
At the end of each player’s turn, that player must draw a mythos card. Each of these cards represents a crisis that the whole group must try to resolve together. Some of these crises, such as “Food Rationing”, call for a choice that could potentially put the ship’s passengers or resources at risk, while others, such as “Hull Leak”, call for a skill test in which failure could have disastrous consequences.
During a skill test, each player contributes skill cards from their hand to a face-down pile shared by the group. Once everyone has contributed (or chosen not to), the cards are shuffled, then revealed. If enough of the correct skills were contributed, then the group passes the test! But if the wrong skills were contributed, they can actually hinder the results, leading to failure. Thus, skill tests are dangerous opportunities for traitors to sabotage the humans’ efforts, so you have to stay on your toes at all times.
We played a 6 player game in which there was found to be two traitors.. the traitors won and the ship began dead in the water.. and Jim was served for dinner to the Great One.
Lee (Yorick) and Richard (Diana Stanley) investigated a series of murders and found a lead from the butler of an old estate. Upon arrival, the butler was discovered murdered. There was a cult planning a ritual and we needed to stop it. Yorick found a hidden door and a brass key. But in the process, cultists, ghosts, mages, frormless spawn, dimensional shamblers and numerous deep ones were summoned. Upon entry to the ritual room, Diana stopped the ritual and took off into the void. Meanwhile, Yorick managed to to avoid being killed or driven insane by three deep ones, a ghost, two cultists and a dimensional shambler. Diane then teleported back to the entrance and made her escape with the evidence. Thus winning the scenario.
Brian, Lee, Mel, Richard and Steve played an investigation at Miskatonic University. We all flunked the examinations and expelled with a permanent note attached to our files. Brian, who has an entire file cabinet with his name on it, had a big VOID stamped on his with the draws welded shut.
This is a game we used play when we were 16 as a 3M Bookshelf game along with the previous Avalon Hill war games the previous 5 years starting with Tractics II.
In Acquire, each player strategically invests in businesses, trying to retain a majority of stock. As the businesses grow with tile placements, they also start merging, giving the majority stockholders of the acquired business sizable bonuses, which can then be used to reinvest into other chains. All of the investors in the acquired company can then cash in their stocks for current value or trade them 2-for-1 for shares of the newer, larger business. The game is a race to acquire the greatest wealth.
History of Acquire: This Sid Sackson classic has taken many different forms over the years depending on the publisher, yet the rules and game play have stayed the same. The 1966 version of the 3M bookshelf edition included rules for a 2-player variant. The original version is part of the 3M Bookshelf Series.
Many books and websites incorrectly list this as a 1962 publication as the 3M Company used previously copyrighted artwork when they released the game in 1964. 3M actually received the idea for the game of “Vacations” from Sid Sackson in May of 1963 and decided to take his idea and put it into artwork they had developed the year before for a game called “ACQUIRE.” 3M’s original game idea for a game called ACQUIRE must not have been very good so they decided to take Sid’s idea of Vacations and put it into their concept of ACQUIRE. They released some limited test market games in 8 Midwestern U.S. cities in December of 1963 with a box that had a 1963 copyright. These games had Sid’s original rules. When 3M released the mass market games in 1964, they had developed some of Sid’s original ideas and changed some rules and game play to match their production desires. They released them with outer boxes that were copyrighted 1962 and inner boxes with rules that were dated 1963.
December 1963 – Test Market World Map Wood Tile Edition
1964 – Dated 1962/63 wood tiles, chipboard with plastic overlay & stocks with printed backs
1965 – Dated 1962/63 plastic tiles, chipboard with plastic overlay & stocks with printed backs (last edition made with printed backs until 1999)
1966 – Dated 1962/66 plastic tiles, chipboard with plastic overlay & non-wax coated stocks (Only edition with these stocks)
1968 – Dated 1968/66 plastic tiles, clear plastic board with paper underlay (Both 1966 inner box games have a lot of mixed parts)
1971 – Dated 1968/71 plastic tiles, yellow hard plastic board
1975 – 3M sells rights for game of ACQUIRE to the Avalon Hill Company
1976 – Dated 1976 plastic tiles, yellow hard plastic board, redesigned money, no inner box (This edition was also produced in 1977, 79, 81, 82, & 86)
1989 – Dated 1976 Gray box edition with new box artwork same contents as regular 1976 editions (This edition was also produced in 1992)
1995 – Dated 1995 Large box cardboard edition with chipboard board and tiles, Special Powers Variant Tiles inspired by German editions
1997 – Avalon Hill sells the rights to the game of ACQUIRE to Hasbro
1999 – Dated 1999 Large box with large plastic board and tiles, 3D company buildings, redesigned stocks & money, large info cards
2006 – Hasbro assigns rights for the game of ACQUIRE to their subsidiary, Wizards of the Coast
2006 – Lloyd’s (private) Rules of ACQUIRE are made public, two major rule changes that help to bring the balance of the game of ACQUIRE back to the intentions of Sid Sackson’s original ideas. Lloyd Solon’s Rules help players to correct poor strategy during the beginning of the game that can been seen with new and unexperienced players (running out of money soon is the main mistake that must be omitted!).
2008 – Dated 2008 cardboard edition with chipboard board & tiles, redesigned stocks & money
2016 – Dated 2016 The current affordable mass-market edition. It looks at first sight to be similar to previous modern editions, but has been criticised for the use of inferior design choices such as hard-to-read grey-on-grey embossed slots and the unusual tile fonts. It contains modified rules and a slightly smaller playing grid. Although these changes have been criticised for not ultimately improving upon Sackson’s original design, they are generally regarded as not being too damaging to it.
2023 – Renegade Game Studio partners with Hasbro, and releases their new version, with Classic Mode or Tycoon Mode — play with or without tertiary stockholder merger bonus.