Survive
Published in: 1982
Oh no! A tropical island is slowing sinking into the sea, and you need to get your people off before the volcano erupts!!
Survive is a fairly simple board game for 2 to 4 players. The board is a large hex grid, with four small little islands in the corners. There are 40 hex tiles the same size as the grid spaces, which are placed in the center of the board at the beginning of the game to create an island - a few center tiles with mountain rocks, a larger number with jungle trees, and beach sand. The mountain rock goes in the middle, surrounded by the jungle, then the sand.
The board tiles are placed down, then each player chooses a color - there are four sets of ten player tokens, each a different color. The tokens also have numbers on the bottom, between 1 and 6 - these represent point values. The goal is the have the most total points on the islands, safe, at the end of the game, so these are important.
Players take turns placing one of their ten tokens on the board, number down - after being placed, nobody can see what the point value is until the end of the game - even after they're killed off. Then each player places two boats in the water (usually next to the island). Then the five sea serpents are placed on the designated spaces (one in the middle of the island, and four around the edges.
Players take turns, and each player first moves their people and/or boats a total of three spaces. You can move pieces around on the island, move a boat (and all pieces "in" the boat), or dive from a boat/land into the sea.
After moving your pieces, you take one of the island pieces and "sink" it. The piece must be touching water on one side, and you must sink all beach before jungle, and all jungle before mountain. All player tokens on the piece end up in the water, and you look at the underside of the island piece for instructions. It may cause a whale or shark to appear, a whirlpool that sucks up all swimming people, boats, shars, whales, and sea serpents, create a boat that the tokens end up on, or give more specific instructions in text, with something you can use later on in the game.
After sinking the piece, you roll a special die. The die has two faces with the shark fin, two with the whale tail, and two with the sea serpent head. Whichever is rolled, the player gets to move from 1-3 spaces (depending on the type). If the whale ends up in a boat space, the boat is sunk and removed, all pieces become swimmers. If a shark ends up with swimmers, they are removed from the game. If the sea serpent ends up in a space with swimmers, they are eaten - if in a space with people in a boat, they're all removed.
Eventually, a specific mountain tile will be sunk, one with a volcano on the back. At that point, any tokens not yet on the corner islands are destroyed, and the surviving tokens are counted up, with the highest score the winner.
That's really all there is to the game - strategy is rather limited because there's a significant amount of randomness involved, but there is some there. It can be quite a fun cutthroat game, as you get to sink the other players' people, and watch them become shark food, while you happily sail on by.
The game was originally released in Europe as (Escape from) Atlantis, with fancier game pieces, but no variety of scores for the individual people.
It has not been re-released by Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro) at this time, and second hand copies are going for at least $30.