Electing President Nemo: Abyss

Being from Greece, sea is imbued in your DNA one way or another. When your lineage is from islanders as it is with me from my mother's side, even more so. As you all understand when George and Yiota came over for some board games, and George took out Abyss, explaining it was a strategy game based on deep sea creatures, I had to use all of my training to not squeal from excitement but instead just act mildly curious.

Abyss is a game in which you all are basically deep sea fish people shooting for the throne after King Triton was murdered brutally by Sebastian after Ariel married prince Eric. To do so, you will have to earn points which are the equivalent of the court's favor, by doing various tasks.
Use all of your cunning to win or buy votes in the Council. Recruit the most influential Lords and abuse their powers to take control of the most strategic territories. Finally, impose yourself as the only one able to rule the Abyssal people!

Abyss is a game of development, combination and collection in which players try to take control of strategic locations in an underwater city. To achieve this, players must develop on three levels: first by collecting allies, then using them to recruit Lords of the Abyss, who will then grant access to different parts of the city. Players acquire cards through a draft of sorts, and the Lords of the Abyss acquired on those cards grant special powers to the cardholder — but once you use the cards to acquire a location, that power is shut off, so players need to time their land grabs well in order to put themselves in the best position for when the game ends.

In all honesty, I am the kind of person that prefers the co-operative games. Competitive games, always get me on the defensive, there is always room for arguments when people are competing, and nobody has time for arguments. Not when the internet demands attention.

This game however, I found to be immensely fun to play. Though you are competing with the other players, there is no open or direct attacks you can do to them, so ultimately win or lose depends on your strategy, cunning and off course, to a smaller extend, luck.

Even paced, not too long but not too short, like most games of a similar nature, the game favors you sticking to a strategy and thinking ahead rather than reacting to what is going on. The two times we have played the game, I have managed to sneak victory once, solely on the fact that I focused on building my alliance with a specific faction of the sea folk and got myself some good building synergies.

Was I knowing what I was doing? Yes. Sort of
Did it work? Off course
Am I going to pretend as if it was a close victory? Off course not, when I give the speech to my people I will make a display of how easy it was.

Selling point of the game: The best Election simulation ever created maybe ever.
Take note politicians.

Lets be honest here, art can make or break any board game. It is why when Risk had to go against Kyklades, Risk ended up being a yucky board game that stinks, while Kyklades turned out to be a game created by mighty Hephaestus and Zeus themselves.

This game's artwork is in one word: sublime.
Great colors, great design, the entire artwork captures the theme perfectly. The symbols of each faction are amazing and even by looking at the characters you can guess what faction they are by the subtle tint of their skin or carapace color.

Personally I love the feel of the deep sea trenches the art invokes. With amazingly designed creatures, both alien but at the same familiar enough in their humanoid characteristics that you can imagine their personality by their expressions and looks.

Also, worth commenting is that the game's currency is pearls. Any game that comes with plastic pearls has an automatic win in my books.

Oh, and by the way: Octopus and Jellyfish people for the WIN.

A game with simple mechanics, rather fast for board game standards, great artwork and extremely fun gameplay. This is a family friendly competitive board game that I was happy to play and will be happy to play again in the future. With two expansions promising more sea goodness the only thing that is rather fishy (THE PUNS TODAY OHMAHGAWD) is the price. Unfortunately as with all board games, the price is not that of your average small party board game, and as such requires some measure of forethought prior purchase.

All in all, it is a game I personally recommend to any group of people that likes board games. It is fast, it is fun and it has a sea theme. What else can you ask?