Unfathomable Review
Has the heart of Battlestar Galactica, with lots of polishing.
An epic social deduction game on a 1910s ship, where the humans seek to escape to port, while the traitors reveal themselves at the right time to sink the ship. Lovecraft theme everywhere at 2-4 hours for 3-6 players.
Video published November 24th, 2021
Welcome aboard the Atlantica... with Deep Ones and Hybrid also on board.
Skill cards can help checks or hurt them.
Who will be the hidden Hybrid, and eventually cause ruin to the humans?
Overview & How to Play
Welcome aboard on this ship, the Atlantica, where we’re sailing and having a jolly good time… with some Lovecraftian monsters trying to sink us.
We’re trying to hit 12 distance and then moving the boat again to win.
At the beginning, after everyone has picked characters, loyalty cards will be given out, where players will probably be human. If not, they’re “Hybrids”, a half-human half-demonic entity disguised as a human to try to sink the ship to win.
For the actual game, on each turn, everyone will draw to add to their hand of Skill Cards, then do 2 actions, then draw a ‘Mythos’ card for the group to work together to accomplish. For that, everyone secretly contributes cards that match the colors of that Mythos card to hit it’s specified number. Otherwise you all fail and get the bad thing. But hey, if you’re a bad guy, then you may want to put in the WRONG colors when putting down cards, and those will count as negative values.
If you’re human, the good guys, you wanna be trying to sniff out the traitor while making sure you get to land safely. If one of your resources, like Fuel goes to 0, or the ship is completely damaged, you’re screwed and humans all die. Oh, and also if the deck gets entirely overrun by Deep Ones and you can’t spawn anymore.
As for team traitor (Hybrids), there’s all sorts of ways to subtly sabotage the humans, like just saying some misleading remark, or actually being really selfish and not helping the team. Whatever you do, you don’t want to get caught, because you eventually want to reveal yourself for a crazy reveal ability. After that damage is done, you expose yourself as a true slime creature still mucking around the ship, even able to attack other players! And of course they can attack you back on their turn.
Pros
Unfathomable just has good aesthetic work done everywhere. There’s nice character portraits, countless items, and big miniatures that are attacking the ship! Going to the characters, there’s 10 of them that all feel nuanced and flavorful, complete with personal backstories. They essentially each have 4 abilities when you factor in their items and once per games. Jeanne Lafarge is an engineer who is all about camping in the Boiler Room to move the ship forward. She can even sacrifice the ship’s integrity to move even more forward! If she happens to be a Hybrid, she can blow up places with her reveal.
The main captain option is Keilani Tatupu, who is really good at ordering idiot Passengers back into the safety of the ship. Keilani also has a really nice flexible way to add cards into skill checks, after cards have been revealed. Unfathomable’s characters range from magical apprentices of the occult, surgeons, to even stowaways, so plenty of diversity.
The Atlantica just feels like a real ship, with the interior being filled with exciting actions, like trying to find items, or reporting to the bridge to look at what’s ahead for the ship. On deck is the scary part of the ship though: with Deep Ones running around, while you need to frantically help passengers to get back in the ship.
At its core though, Unfathomable is social deduction. So that is mostly facilitated through players helping/sabotaging Skill Checks through Skill Cards (where you can even draw outside of your normal Skill set). Skill Cards are awesome, with each of them letting you trigger a different thing on the map, and if you’re a Hybrid, you can perhaps use their special ability to attempt to hurt the team.
This lying and deflecting lying and sowing chaos is all throughout many hours and it just leads to a nervous nervous time. But a big test of these long social deduction games is what happens AFTER the cover is blown and someone is a revealed traitor. This is especially more so if they just suck at lying and/or want to reveal early. And Battlestar Cthlutica does this pretty well, as revealed players continue to just do stuff ON the ship—they’re still walking around the ship when revealed!
Unfathomable really is this theme meets gameplay of 1913 cruise ship gone wrong with your friends, some of which are actually these slimy Hybrids controlling the Deep Ones trying to kill everyone. There’s events happening with the Mythos cards and Items while the ship continues to break down, and Passengers are dying left and right.
Cons & Nitpicks
There are some slight concerns with gameplay as a revealed Hybrid though, where it is just too weak to get sent to the Brig as this revealed traitor, since revealed traitors can still trigger 2 actions, namely powerful spells they can play from their hand. Then in general, it is almost never worth it to attack revealed Hybrids on the ship.
Unfathomable still has some more slight issues of being a revealed traitor, and could not fully escape the woes of long social deduction there. After many hours of gameplay, playing as a revealed Hybrid is just not that engaging, where you only have one action, while the humans talk among themselves for a long time on their turns. Yet note that this tail end of the traitor being a little stale is vastly improved over this game’s predecessor: Battlestar Galactica, because there is just more one can do as a revealed traitor here.
Final Thoughts
Eyes constantly dart with all the tells, bluff, reveals, and maybe your hand is getting shaky holding those skill cards after lying for these many hours. But Unfathomable’s excellence isn’t with regards to it’s perfect balance, rather it's the crazy stories this voyage can bring up. Who knows what will happen in the middle in the Atlantic ocean? Maybe the ship doesn’t draw a waypoint advance for 3 turns and your boiler room has been randomly damaged, well that’s a story. Or maybe the traitors revealed TOO early and the game feels like a long team game. Maybe the traitors don’t even have to do anything because the humans hilariously brig themselves!
Whatever the case, its shorter than BSG, so now is the time to try grand social deduction. And hey, even if you suck at lying, Unfathomable still lets you have more agency in controlling your deep one army, and man isn’t it nice to play as the bad guys in Lovecraft for once?
