Saturday 13 January 2018
Captain Sonar
Captain Sonar is a very interesting board game when played in "real-time" mode. It's basically a complicated upgrade of "Battleships", played by two teams each representing the crew of a submarine, each with an assigned role, each submarine trying to hunt down and destroy the other. In real-time mode, each team can make moves as quickly as they're able to carry them out. A team that can make moves more quickly then their opponents has a large advantage. That makes the game more stressful than any other board game I've played, since there is constant pressure to act quickly and minimize time taken to think ... but under such pressure it's easy to make mistakes that will damage your own submarine or make you lose track of your opponents.
The stress makes some people dislike the game, which is understandable, but other people love it. If you enjoy this sort of thing, it makes for an intense, shared experience which magnifies the fun. It's notable that after each real-time game I've seen, the entire group has spent at least ten minutes talking over the game and reliving the highlights. This doesn't happen as much in other games with this group.
It seems that a lot of the skill in the game is about each player focusing their attention on just the information needed for their role, blocking out all the other activity, while still coordinating with their team members as needed and perhaps overhearing information from the other team if relevant to their role, all under pressure. It's a very interesting exercise from that point of view. It might be quite a good activity for "team building", although as mentioned some people are going to hate it.
For certain kinds of jobs, perhaps introduce Captain Sonar as part of the interview process :-).
One of the problems with the game is that it's easy for a mistake made by one side to disadvantage the other side, such as when a captain announces a move but records a different move. When my team wins, I have uncomfortable doubts that we might have won because we made a mistake. We mitigate this problem by having two people operate as referees, each checking the moves made by one team, but even that doesn't fully eliminate the problem. Adding some software to the game might possibly help here.