Red November is a co-operative board game by Bruno Faidutti, published by Fantasy Flight Games. The premise is about drunken gnomes in their nuclear submarine. Everything is wrong -- the gnomes must try to survive for an hour before the help arrives.

Mechanics: Mostly Clear

Making co-operative board games is not an easy task. The game has to avoid becoming like playing solitaire with a group of people (which is, if you have tried it, pretty irritating experience). In Red November this is tackled by introducing two important decisions -- players can affect their odds by spending more or less time on specific repair tasks and by drinking grog. Drinking grog risks passing out and spending less time risks wasting the repair time used altogether. Individual players can surprise their comrades by succeeding against the odds (and saving time in the process) or passing out in the middle of action and thus causing more problems to others. This is all good and fine, I guess.

The fixing mechanic of rolling a ten-sided dice will undoubtedly divide the players.Some will like the random factor and the possibility to either take a chance or use enough minutes to have 100% chance of succeeding. And I imagine others would prefer other mechanics to dice rolling. In this case I fall into the latter category, but that's just my preference and the mechanic itself is sound enough.

The mechanic of drawing (ominous) event cards when you use up minutes is stronger than the dice rolling mechanic. There's some randomity like rolling for which room of the sub is flooded or in fire, but it evens out in time and the game stays pretty tight throughout in most games. The only weak part in that mechanic is the beginning of the game where I have found some bewilderment amongst new players as to why they should do anything because advancing time just gets them into trouble. Astute observation and I don't really have a good answer to that.

Presentation and Production: Sleet and Hail

The main weakness of Red November, however, is the presentation of the game which is lacking in a few key points. First, the game box is very small and it is almost impossible to pack the various chits back into it after playing. Second, the item tiles are small and contain only icons. That makes them difficult to shuffle and makes learning their use more work. Third, the game board is very small; Also the minute track that is on its edges is tiny and on my copy clipped badly on one edge.

All these things make the game a hassle to play. Packing and unpacking the game are not major parts of the gameplay experience but I have to say that the ridiculous mismatch of the amount of chits and the tiny game box has made me hesitate to suggest playing the game as I know I'll be the one doing the packing after.

As for the tiles I think that the only viable reason for using tiles instead of cards is the size of the game box. And considering my previous point this isn't a viable explanation either. If the items would be on cards there would be room to print the rules related to the items on them also, making the game much easier to learn. When you have two rule summary cards for a maximum of eigth players that is simply too few. Plus the cards would be easier to shuffle and stack face down also (yea yea I know that you don't need to stack all the tiles on top of each other but turning them all face down is a hassle nonetheless).

As for the game board I would go for a larger one with ample room for the minute track. A larger board would allow for rule explanations for each of the special rooms of the submarine too, removing the need to consult the rule book.

All in all I really cannot understand why Fantasy Flight Games had to publish this game in such a small box. It isn't like you could play this on a train or the back seat of a car as you'd only lose all your numerouschits in the process. I guess price is a factor here. On the other hand this kind of usability problems have ruined this otherwise pretty good game for me. In short I'd rather play Pandemic which is performs admirable on production values and usability. Drunken gnomes and nuclear submarines is a great premise but it is spoiled by the execution - surprisingly not the game mechanics itself but the presentation.