Fancy yourself a submarine captain but don’t feel like spending hours playing cat and mouse against an enemy sub? “Brace For Impact!”, a 2 player game that’ll be launching on Kickstarter in March of 2017, may be what you’re looking for. It supports ages 12 and up and has an average play time of 5 minutes, making it very quick and easy to play. It also comes in a small tin case, making it very portable. Special thanks to Chris Rossetti from Rampage Games LLC for providing me with a prototype for preview purposes. It’s important to stress that prototypes are not often reflective of the finished product, making everything you’re about to see and read about here (including the rules) subject to change.
The idea of “Brace For Impact!” is to kill all of the enemy crew OR gain five intelligence games to win the game. This is done by rolling dice (specifically a seven or doubles) and taking actions. There are no player turns, so the quicker you are at rolling and taking actions, the better off you’ll be. Players start with three crew meeples, one unloaded torpedo, and two dice of their color along with a double-sided chit to where the “surface” side is face-up. The extra meeples and eight intelligence gems are placed between the players.
As mentioned previously, rolling a seven or doubles allows you to take actions. The actions you can take depend on whether or not you’re on the surface or underwater as indicated by your player chit.
Surface
Rolling a Seven: Dive (flip your chit to the underwater side) OR add 1 meeple of your color to your crew.
Rolling Doubles: Load a torpedo (place your colored torpedo onto your chit) OR remove one intelligence token from the enemy, placing back into the center of the table.
Underwater
Rolling a Seven: Surface (flip your chit to the surface side) OR take 1 intelligence gem from the center of the table.
Rolling Doubles: Load a torpedo OR fire a torpedo, forcing your opponent to lose a crew member and place it back into the central pool.
Play continues until one player wins by killing all of the enemy crew or by getting five intelligence tokens.
It’s a very simple game so this preview won’t be very long, but I think it’ll serve as a great filler for two-player game nights where both players need a break from longer play sessions. The game fits right in your pocket or purse, so you can easily bring it with you and have at it assuming it’s appropriate to do so…funerals, for example, may not be the appropriate place to pretend that you’re launching torpedoes and sinking enemy submarines. Call me crazy, but I believe some might frown upon that kinda thing.
To give you a better idea of what everything looks like, I compiled a video to go along with this written preview. Hopefully it’ll give you the visual representation you’ll need to make a decision either way. “Brace For Impact!” is not in-depth by any means, but sometimes when you’re having a brain-fart kinda day, simple games are probably for the best. For casual players and/or people who simply don’t like being rushed, I recommend adjusting the rules to make the dice rolling turn-based as opposed to real-time. In fact I recommend doing this for your first game just so you get a feel of how the dice rolls work.
As a side note, Rampage Games are the same folks who brought you “Iron Horses” and “Elements“, both of which I really enjoyed playing. I recommend checking them out after you’re done backing or at least perusing this compact yet riveting submarine battler. Pledging $13 or more will grant you a copy, though you can check out more support levels via the link below for some extra cool stuff.
Kickstarter: http://www.brace4impactgame.com
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