My first 18 player game of Captain Sonar nearly broke my brain

I always rolled my eyes at the hype around this one, figured it was just loud chaos in a box. Then last Saturday at a meetup in Austin, someone convinced me to try it with two full teams and a real captain calling orders. The radio silence when we were hunting the enemy sub was intense, and my hand cramped up tracing our route on the map sheet. By minute 40 we finally sunk them, and the whole table screamed like we won a championship. Has anyone else had a game that looks like a gimmick but turns out to be a total adrenaline ride?

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leo_carr1328d ago

Shrugged it off for years too, figured it was just four people yelling at each other with a magnet. Then I got stuck on the engineer role during a demo and had to shout out system updates while tracing a zigzag course with a dry erase marker. The real kicker was when we had to backtrack because our own captain misread the sonar, and the tension got so thick you could hear people breathing. We lost that round, but the next one we pulled off a perfect pincer move, and I swear my heart was pounding harder than any board game I've played in 20 years. It's not a gimmick, it's just a game that demands everyone actually buy in, and when they do, it's something else.