Lifeboat Review
“Merde! ‘Ow did it come to zis? One moment zound azleep in my cabin, ze next lumped into a teeny boat and no wine for a hundred kilometre! Zut alors! Now ze English pig iz insisting he haz my seat, ze first mate iz trying to drown ze poor innocent little boy and I will be sunburnt before ze day is out. It is all ze fault of zat cursed Captain! Maybe if I can steal ‘is parasol ze wretched toad will die of thirst!”
Welcome to the cutthroat world of Lifeboat! Where your fellow travellers will fight tooth and nail over just about anything. Except the kid. He’ll just steal everything until whoever is at the rudder gets sufficiently annoyed and tips him into the ocean.
The name of the game is survival, your survival, but not necessarily everyone else’s. You see every player has a secret rival on the boat who gets bonus victory points for seeing that player dead. But you don’t want the others to realise this or they might try and stop you. A convenient accident or two needs to be arranged. Everyone is also secretly in love with another player, getting points if they survive. Given 5/6 characters in the game are male, there has sure been a lot of male bonding happening on this boat!
Each turn you can help get the boat to safety by rowing, you can use an item you’ve picked up, like a med-kit or a flare gun, or you can try and either swap seats with, or steal from another player. This is where conflict kicks in. Because Sir Stephan rather likes sitting behind the First Mate, he casts a large shadow and the breeze is blowing in at just the right angle to be comfortable and besides your seat is full of uncomfortable looking knots and if you try and take it from him he’ll clobber you with this oar thank you very much!
But seating position is key to getting your way in this game. Sit at the front and you get first pick of the provisions the boat has come across that day, including the useful tools that may look like weapons but don’t you worry Frenchie this Gaffing Hook is purely decorative. Not to mention all the jewels and cash floating around from the wreck that sure will come in handy when you get back to shore!
Sit at the back though, and while you only get everyone else’s leavings, you are in control of the navigation and can decide who has tragically slipped and fallen into the sea, or who has exerted themselves a bit too much in the hot sun today, bringing those characters ever closer to death. So sorry you fell in Captain, there was a seagull, if only everyone had rowed a bit harder instead of fighting there could have been another way…
But be careful, rowing players will know if there was a better option. If you choose to punish someone when you could have helped the whole team, you better bet they’re gonna tell everyone. And keeping everyone on side is important, especially for the weaker characters. This is a game of shifting power and alliances, and most importantly knowing when to strike and when to bide your time.
Sometimes, though, it’s hard to know what you can do if you’re locked out of alliances and too weak to act alone. Hey Kid! What do you want to do this turn? Er… steal again? There is a lack of agency in playing the weakest characters, a reliance on protection from that hopefully stronger character that loves you. The brutal truth is, the weakest tend to die first out on the open waters. But then maybe therein lie the greater challenges, and the greater rewards.
And when the seagulls have been spotted and land appears on the horizon? Then it’s time to cash in your gains, buy passage on the next ship out of port and do it all over again. Ho! The sailor’s life for me…
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