Unfathomable (Board Game)

The year is 1913. The steamship SS Atlantica is two days out from port onits voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Its unsuspecting passengers fullyanticipated a calm journey to Boston, Massachusetts, with nothing out of theordinary to look forward to. However, strange nightmares plague the minds of thepeople aboard the ship every night; rumors circulate of dark shapes followingclosely behind the ship just beneath the waves; and tensions rise when a body isdiscovered in the ship's chapel, signs of a strange ritual littered around thecorpse.

Lurking within the depths of the Atlantic Ocean are a swarm of vicious,unspeakable horrors: the Deep Ones, led by Mother Hydra and Father Dagon. Forreasons unknown, they have set their sights on the Atlantica, and their minions,taking the form of human-Deep One hybrids, have infiltrated the steamship tohelp sink it from within. Each game of Unfathomable has one or more playersassuming the role of one of these hybrids, and how well they can secretlysabotage the efforts of the other players might mean the difference between asuccessful voyage and a sunken ship.

If you're a human, you need to fend off Deep Ones, prevent the Atlantica fromtaking too much damage, and carefully manage the ship's four crucial resourcesif you want any hope of making it to Boston, all while trying to figure outwhich of your fellow players are friends and which are foes. Everyone shares thesame resource pool, but humans will try to preserve them while traitors willstrive to subtly deplete them. Being able to tell when someone is purposefullydraining the group's resources is harder than you think, especially when youtake crises into account!

At the end of each player's turn, that player must draw a mythos card. Eachof these cards represents a crisis that the whole group must try to resolvetogether. Some of these crises, such as “Food Rationing”, call for a choicethat could potentially put the ship's passengers or resources at risk, whileothers, such as “Hull Leak”, call for a skill test in which failure couldhave disastrous consequences.

During a skill test, each player contributes skill cards from their hand to aface-down pile shared by the group. Once everyone has contributed (or chosen notto), the cards are shuffled, then revealed. If enough of the correct skills werecontributed, then the group passes the test! But if the wrong skills werecontributed, they can actually hinder the results, leading to failure. Thus,skill tests are dangerous opportunities for traitors to sabotage the humans'efforts, so you have to stay on your toes at all times.