I’ve caught myself watching a few disaster based TV Dramas recently. Some examples have been Paradise and After the Flood. They have been tremendous so I reached out to our team of bloggers here at Zatu looking for their favourite disaster based games and here is what the team have come up with for you, enjoy!
The Downfall of Pompeii - Sean Franks
Nothing screams disaster like a volcano eruption. Just ask movies, TV shows and air traffic controllers.
With plenty of big ones in history you'd be hard pressed not to find a game about one, so I present the one I enjoy the most, The Downfall Of Pompeii.
The gameplay revolves around throwing your friends into the flames as you seek to become the dominant family to survive....well not strictly speaking, but that is what it has boiled down to most of the time!
The actual game consists of up to 4 players slowly populating Pompeii by playing cards and then extending your families through the ancient town. Even as you reach AD79 and mysterious Omens cause people to dissappear (or be chucked into the volcano by the players) you keep on going. But suddenly you'll draw the second AD79 card and disaster strikes.
A great booming sound echos and lava starts spewing up from the very earth, now its every man, woman and child for themselves! Merge with the rushing crowds towards the exit gates, divert the lava tiles towards (and onto) your fellow player's pieces (then chuck them into the volcano too) and try not to get your pieces stranded alone!
The game is definitely a firm favourite for a short filler, with the rules nailed down a game can be run through in about 20 minutes and setup isn't long. Some people may just want to be friendly, with hopes of getting most of their people out alive, but playing with a really cut-throat bunch of players is always a blast too!
Now my friends can never decide which is the worst disaster, the volcano erupting to ruin the family they spent the game building up, or me drawing an Omen card and making them beg for their pieces life before I throw it into the volcano regardless!
Fire Tower - Dan Street-Phillips
Nothing shouts natural disaster like the fury of a forest fire. Fire is fast and relentless and so makes for an exciting but terrifying foe in 2019’s Fire Tower. It puts players in charge of their
own fire tower on one of the four corners of a forest map with a fire starting at the very centre, but what makes this gameplay so intriguing is, as well as deciding where to send water to put out areas of fire or building fire breaks, it also sees you control where the fire spreads. The game is simple. At the start of your turn you choose where to place a fire token based on the direction of the wind and then you play a card. You have a hand of cards that each do something different. There are fire cards that allow you to expand the fire towards other towers, water cards that allow you to put out areas of fire and there are wind change cards that do what it says on the tin. The first one to lose their tower ends the game and everyone else wins. The gameplay is fun and chaotic but what makes the game stand out is its gorgeous production. The fire tokens are these beautiful semi-translucent, amber crystals that really pop as the fire spreads. It works with any age, it’s a small box and a really good price point. Some may say, it’s ‘lit’!
Robinson Crusoe (Adventures on the Cursed Island) - Charlotte Curzon
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island (or just Robinson Crusoe to a lot of gamers) is inspired by the famous novel, where the players (or player, as this can be played solo) take on the role of shipwrecked castaways who must work together to survive.
There are multiple game scenarios which could have players facing raft building, shelter building, beast hunting, exploring the terrain and more, by my personal favourite scenario fits the disaster theme beautifully: Volcano Island. In this scenario, the island’s volcano has erupted whilst you were close by and the players have to escape the island before lava and ash consume it, all whilst finding food to eat, locating treasure, building a boat, and avoiding the harsh heath-depleting nights and lava flow by continuously moving and repairing your camp. Volcano Island is limited to just 8 turns, and at the beginning of turn 4, the lava begins to cover parts of the island, spreading further each turn limiting your access to the island and forcing you to keep moving. If you’re unlucky enough to have your camp on one of the island tiles that the volcanic lava flow reaches, the game is immediately lost (fortunately you know in advance which parts of the board this will be).
Robinson Crusoe as a whole is not an easy game, even with the beginner scenario the win percentage sits much lower than the loss percentage for a significant portion of players. What makes this game one of my favourites is the written rules that allow you to change the difficulty by adding or removing certain components during setup. These can make the game easier or harder depending on your preference. I personally don’t like the challenge and play with one of the suggested modifications to make the game easier, and our win/loss ratio is 50:50. When I’m in the mood for a challenging game, Robinson Crusoe is definitely up there in my top picks.
Zombicide 2nd Edition - David IreIand
The Zombie virus is out there, Humanity is on the brink and only a handful of survivors remain fighting for their very existence against the Zombie Hordes that do not let up.
This game is a pure disaster and there is no defeating the Zombies, they are just survival. The game is for 1-6 people to work cooperatively as a team of survivors against the game which controls the Zombies. Starting off slowly with relatively few Zombies, the game ramps up and as the bullets fly, chainsaws carve and players' adrenaline goes through the roof. Can the survivors complete the game objectives before the Zombies are just too much to hold back?
The base game here contains 25 unique missions from a set of interchangeable game board tiles meaning each is different with very different parameters. You also have a dozen unique characters, each with their own unique skill set to bring to the mission and the diversity of skills is useful and arguably very necessary. There is so much replayability in this game as you never see the same game twice, it just isn’t possible. Even playing the same mission with the same survivors will turn out differently each time with how the hordes come in, the weapons found by survivors and the chance dice rolls.
I’ve a lot of time for Zombicide and plays well whether you are on your own in solo play or have a team of 5 friends alongside you. It’s great fun.
Pandemic: Fall of Rome and Pandemic: Rising Tide - Ian Paczek
The original Pandemic has a number of reskins and two of my favourites, which are also potential disaster movies, are Fall of Rome and Rising Tide. In the original Pandemic the players cooperate to battle four different infections and prevent their spread across a world map.
Each player has a particular role, which grants a small asymmetric boon. The core mechanics centre on the deck of cards which have several uses – principally travelling and curing disease. Most of the time though, you are fire-fighting by treating individual patients and thus removing infection cubes from the board. Finding a cure is not simple – you need five cards of the same colour and to be in a city with a research station. Then you can produce a cure for the matching Disease.
These mechanics carry over into Fall of Rome, but instead of treating and hopefully curing diseases, you are fighting the barbarian hordes as they march towards the eternal city. There are five invading tribes, rather than four diseases in the base game, and they move along particular supply chains towards Rome. A barbarian tribe can be “cured” or neutralised by allying with them and unlike the base game, some are easier than others to cure/ally with. The Vandals and Visigoths are the most difficult, requiring five cards, and the Ostrogoths are the easiest, requiring only three.
If there are too many barbarians in a city and it gets sacked. If the barbarians ever reach the gates of Rome itself in sufficient strength to sack it, then it’s game over. There is also a “decline” track which measures how close Roman society and culture is to collapse. If this reaches the bottom, then the game also ends and not in a good way.
Rising Tide is another reimplementation of Pandemic. However, this time you are not battling Huns and Vandals, but the North Sea. Rising Tide is set in the Netherlands at the beginning of the Industrial Age and your task is to collectively build four hydraulic structures to prevent inundation of the low-lying land. Along the way you build or repair dykes and build pumping stations to slow down the encroachment of floodwater. Water will flow and if you haven’t designed your defences appropriately, you will be in danger of being swamped. Just as in the base game, players have different occupations with small power boosts that can make pushing back the sea slightly easier.
Fall of Rome and Rising Tide are two very thematic additions to the Pandemic family and if you already know Pandemic, then these two will be very familiar, but they are different enough to be a distinct experience.
Survive The Island - Chris Ridley
In Survive The Island, each player controls 10 adventures
trying to escape a sinking island covered in erupting volcanoes… and this isn’t even half of it! On top of the rising sea levels and volcanoes, there’s also sharks, sea serpents and Godzilla-style kaiju seeking to disrupt your escape plans and devour your adventurers.
While this may sound like a real mashup of disasters, the game brings it all together to deliver fun and suspenseful gameplay. In terms of gameplay, each player takes their turn to remove an island tile from the board, and then moves their adventurers closer to safety. Each island tile has a different ability on the back, allowing players to move monsters, deploy new rafts or gain additional movement. If a monster is ever placed in the same space as adventurers and/or rafts, they are removed from the game. Once three volcano tiles are revealed or all adventurers have been removed from the board, the game ends. Each adventurer has a hidden score value on its base; the winner is determined by who has scored the most points from their rescued adventurers.
Its rules are simple enough to teach as you play, and the aesthetics are minimal yet appealing, which only adds to the enjoyment.
Pandemic Legacy Season 1 - Chris Ridley
I’m a huge fan of the Pandemic Legacy Trilogy and would argue that they are the best Legacy games ever made. In Pandemic Legacy, Matt Leacock and team build upon the tried-and-tested Pandemic system by introducing new mechanics, character creation and - as you’d expect from a Legacy game - permanent changes to the gameboard and components.
Season 1 begins with the players taking on the roles of employees at the CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tasked with minimizing the spread and long-term effects of four diseases across the globe. Where Season 1 deviates from vanilla Pandemic, is that it’s played across 12 in-game months. Over these 12 months, you’ll be faced with new challenges, developments in the story and the unlocking of new characters and mechanics. While the theme can hit a bit too close to home for some after 2020, it does a great job at building the world ready for Season 2 (a post-apocalyptic sequel) and Season 0 (a Cold-War era prequel), each adding their own twists to the story and their own unique takes on how to take an all-time classic board game into a story-driven Legacy game.
Final Thoughts
One common theme comes through from all these games and that is the intensity of them. There is so much jeopardy and they all feel like they hang in the balance at each and every point of play, much like the TV shows that got me started in looking at them. We hope we’ve given you a few ideas for your disaster based table top play, we’ve had a lot of fun talking about these games.
