considerable body of science fiction concerns the hazards and rewards of exploring the ocean floor, from Jules Verne's novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to movies such as Sphere and The Abyss. The earlier end of this spectrum is captured in the new board game Nautilus.
In Nautilus, players control groups of researchers jointly engaged in building an underwater city, finding buried treasure, developing technologies and reassembling the lost city of Atlantis. The game is played on a bluish board, with darker shades representing deeper (and more expensive to access) parts of the sea. In the shallowest part is the first piece of what will become the underwater city. Chits representing various treasures are randomly scattered around the board, face down so that players do not know which are which.
Each turn is divided into a module phase, a researcher phase and a submarine phase. All players perform each phase before moving on to the next phase.
During the module phase, each player can purchase and place either a research module or a habitation module. Each research module is keyed to an area of undersea technology: sub engines, sonar, researcher training, analysis or extraction. Habitation modules contain new researchers. Once a module is purchased, it is placed on the board with one of its airlocks connected to an unused airlock in the underwater city. Over the course of the game, the city grows to include dozens of modules.
In the researcher phase, each player moves his researchers around the city. They activate research modules to advance the player's technology (paying a small fee to the module's owner for the privilege), and can also line up at the airlocks in preparation for the submarine phase.
In the submarine phase, researchers launch subs, make sonar readings to find where the best treasure is, travel to it and finally excavate it. Treasure includes buried chests, precious undersea animals, hidden currents and pieces of Atlantis. Most of these earn victory points and can have other game effects as well.
The game ends when all of Atlantis is discovered. Players then multiply points they've earned through research by the points they've earned through treasures, with the highest total winning. Some uncertainty about the outcome is always present, because each player will have a secret bonus for two types of treasure (making them worth more to that player than to others).
Whimsy under the waves
Physically, Nautilus is an attractive game. The cardboard pieces are colorful, and the plastic pieces, while very small and simple, have a Steam Age whimsy about them.
Structurally, a game of Nautilus falls into two distinct parts. The early part is a race to bring in researchers and get submarines moving as fast as possible, while simultaneously developing
technologies which aid in this. Doing all this costs Nemo (money), and as there are very few sources of Nemo, the generous starting supply eventually begins to dwindle. About this time, the second part begins: Research becomes more about earning points then making breakthroughs, and exploration becomes a tense competition to gain the most points (from the really worthwhile treasures) while spending
the least Nemo excavating them.
Winning Nautilus can be hard for first-timers, as only experience can show how actions in the early part of the game affect the later part. It can also be tricky to decide when to shift gears from the dizzying expansion of the early game to the hard-headed tradeoffs later on. Even with experienced opponents, the game lends itself to a runaway victory by one player, particularly since it is very difficult to block another player's activities (we are all colleagues in the cause of progress, after all).
Even when the eventual winner is fairly clear, though, it's still fun pushing around the little submarines and scientists. And the hidden treasures and secret bonuses usually leave open the (slim)
possibility of an upset victory.
One variation from game to game is the degree to which players "play nice" when connecting new modules. In my first game, the underwater city was rationally constructed with intersections and redundant paths. In the second, with people deliberately making things difficult for each other, it became a twisted labyrinth in which it could take several turns for a researcher to walk between two
adjacent (but not directly connected) modules.
All in all, Nautilus is interesting, challenging and enjoyable, though there are too few strategies available to make it a game you'd want to play over and over again in a short space of time. But if the hidden deeps are calling to you, by all means dive in.
At least once during each game I played, someone dropped a research module expressly for the purpose of collecting fees when the other players used it. This always reminded me a ludicrous line from the disastrous disaster movie Twister: "They're in it for the money ... not the science."
— Bob
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