In Pax Pamir, each player assumes the role of a nineteenth-century Afghan leader attempting to forge a new state after the collapse of the Durrani Empire. Western histories often call this period “The Great Game” because of the role played by the Europeans who attempted to use Central Asia as a theater for their own rivalries. In this game, those empires are viewed strictly from the perspective of the Afghans who sought to manipulate the interloping ferengi (foreigners) for their own purposes. In terms of gameplay, Pax Pamir is a pretty straightforward tableau builder. Players will spend most of their turns purchasing cards from a central market and then playing those cards in front of them in a single row called a court. Playing cards adds units to the game’s map and grants access to additional actions that can be taken to disrupt other players and influence the course of the game. That last point is worth emphasizing. T hough everyone is building their own row of cards, the game offers many ways for players to interfere with each other, both directly and indirectly. To survive, players will organize into coalitions. In the game, thesecoalitions are identified chiefly by their sponsors. Two of the coalitions (British and Russian) are supported by European powers. The third coalition (Afghan) is backed by nativist elements who want to end European involvement in the region. T hroughout the game, the different coalitions will be evaluated when a special event card, called a Dominance Check, is resolved. If a single coalition has a commanding lead during one of these checks, players loyal to that coalition will receive victory points based on their influence in that coalition. However, if Afghanistan remains fragmented during one of these checks, players instead will receive victory points based on their personal power base.

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.

The game is actually a retooling of the previous Battlestar Galactica board game. There was a problem with licensing agreements so Battlestar was abandoned and a new game retoolsed.

Finally got the upstairs shelves and cabinets installed and painted. We are now ready to start moving all our treasures upstairs. A bit of drama with the dragons. They flew upstairs to their new high perches but Cthulhu had other ideas and knocked what he called “smoke stained flying lizards” off the perch and took the top for himself as he said ‘’as expected”… the two Black Dragons are mad at each other because the Red Dragon bested them for the next best perch.