Games from the Crypt #4 - Julian Courtland-Smith's One Hit Wonder

My friend who had never played Survive! asked, “is this a co-op game?”

I replied, telling a half or maybe quarter truth, “Yes, sort of.”

Another friend who had played responded immediately “When Michael says its ‘sort of’ a co-op game you know he’s lying.”

And from there it was off to the races, the races being a cutthroat, mad dash to transport the survivors of an island apocalypse to the safety of surrounding isles. Such as it is with Julian Courtland-Smith’s brilliant, timeless Survive! – a game originally published to considerable sales success in 1982 by Parker Brothers in the United States and by Waddingtons (as Escape from Atlantis with 3D plastic tiles) in the UK. It’s also been made available with other, similar titles and subtitles around the world with the most recently available edition called, descriptively “Survive the Island”. This is the version, thanks to French publisher Zygomatic Games, that is currently available for play on Board Game Arena.

I had not played the game in some years, which is a tremendous oversight on my part because revisiting this classic Game From the Crypt I was reminded once again about how great this nasty design is. Originally designed as a mass-market family game, it went through some wilderness years between the mid-80s and its rediscovery in the early 2000s as a hobby game concern thanks to Stronghold Games (RIP) and a series of updates and expansions including a whole new Science Fiction-themed version designed by games scholar Geoff Englestein and his family of designers.

Some of its concepts were quite ahead of their time in 1982- the modular hex board looks a lot like Catan, and the gameplay that mixes cooperation with competition wasn’t terribly common in the mainstream market. The concept is that the central island is sinking into oblivion due to volcanic eruptions and everybody has got to get off the island via rafts or by swimming. The rafts hold three survivors and can be a mix of any players’ pieces. And anyone on board can commandeer said raft. Each player gets three moves and then they take one of the island’s tiles off the board, sinking it into the ocean. The tiles are also action and event cards with a variety of special events and functions both good and bad. They are also staged such that the beach tiles must be removed before the forest and then the rock tiles, which also times the game. When three volcanoes are drawn, it’s all over and everyone looks at their survivors that made it. They score 1-5 points each, the values being secret.

Now, here’s where it gets ugly. There are three sea creatures. At the end of your turn, you roll a die and move whichever it shows- meaning that you can aggressively prevent other survivors from escaping. There are four Sea Serpents (one of gaming’s most iconic pieces if you ask me) guarding the outlying islands. If one of these moves into a space with a raft and/or survivors they eat everything there. There are sharks that eat swimmers, and in most editions of the game there are whales that wreck rafts and dump survivors into the water. So a lot of the game is navigating these mutual threats, which other players are using against each other to do the most damage.

Needless to say, this not a game for tender feelings or “cozy” anything. This is a game where you do degenerate things like steering a boat with one of your survivors and two of an opponent’s directly into danger. Or you cooperate to get the raft to shore and then push it away, jump out, and swim your survivor to shore. You can always pull a tile from underneath a survivor, sometimes directly into a whirlpool. Alliances of convenience are a thing, as are shameful, shameful betrayals.

The tiles include some counters such as shark repellent (not sure if it’s the same that Batman uses), a friendly dolphin to help swimmers along, and other simple effects. So sudden reversals can happen. This is a game of high drama to be sure, even though it is really a comedy. I’ve played this game with a wide range of players and it’s always a success- apart from groups where vicious competition and harrowing turns of fate aren’t welcome. But who wants to play with those fun murderers anyway?

Now, here’s the rub with this new version. The whale has been change to a Godzilla-ish kaiju and at first I was like no way, that’s dumb. But that was before I realized that there are also a minor yet massively impactful rules additions with this monster. Now, when the whale/kaiju moves into a space (which can be a land space, which is a new thing), it throws everything there however many spaces they would normally move. Talk about a ligh tbulb moment- I realized during our game that the kaiju could throw a shark at a swimmer. Or the sea serpent at a loaded boat. And then it dawned on me that the kaiju could pull a classic face turn and throw one of my survivors onto a boat.

All of that adds quite a new angle to the game and increases your options. Admittedly, the whale was always kind of the least effective creature, and this update totally works to make it a much more powerful effect. I’m not sure if Mr. Courtland-Smith was involved in this piece of redevelopment or if it appeared in previous editions, by jingo now I don’t want to play without it. Whoever is responsible for it gets the spirit of the game.

Reflecting on where Survive! sits among the hobby gaming pantheon, it remains a unique, memorable, and accessible design that anyone can play and enjoy. It doesn’t feel dated in any way, other than the fact that games that offer this much so many delicious opportunities to murder your friends and family aren’t as popular as they once were. The game’s closest ancestor, and a game widely tipped as a successor to Survive! would be Klaus Jurgen-Wrede’s woefully out of print Downfall of Pompeii, which was most definitely inspired by this game. I recall there being some low-key controversy among family gamers at the time about the ethics of burying your opponents in lava as they flee or throwing them into a 3D volcano, but the whole time I was like “ya’ll ain’t played Survive, have you?”

Unfortunately, Mr. Courtland-Smith’s ludography is mostly just editions of Survive! and a previous, and also pretty good, family game called Valley of the Dinosaurs that was reprinted back in 2023. He’s kind of a one-hit wonder, but his one hit was very successful and here I am over 40 years later playing that one hit online with friends across the country. Sometimes a designer has that one absolute banger, that one “Goodbye Horses” that echoes down through the ages.

And there’s not much of better validation of this crypt-kicker than to hear “let’s play this again next week.”

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Tags: history | board games | Family Games | games from the crypt