Hellapagos - First Play!

26th April 2022

Tuesday is here and we're at The Sovereigns with the Woking Gaming Club.
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Does Hellapagos mean hell in the Galapagos islands, I didn't see any giant tortoises in the game?

Anyway; Hellapagos is a (Somewhat!) cooperative game about surviving the ordeals of being shipwrecked on what would in other circumstances be a tropical paradise, building rafts and escaping.

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What's in a game?

• Game board: Hellapagos comes with a oblong board that depicts an idyllically and cheerfully colourful tropical beach scene with survivors scavenging and hunting.
  There are spaces for completed raft cards and the weather deck.
  Raft track: There's a track to monitor the 6 stages required to build a raft.
  Resource track: Running around the perimeter of the board is the track for food and water.
• Cards: The game makes use of a couple of types of cards.
  Wreckage cards: This deck of cards contains items that players might find when scavenging the wrecked remains of their boat. This might include bottled water, food or even weapons and more!
  Weather deck: This slim deck of cards is used to manage the very changeable weather and rainfall in Hellapagos. Each card will display a number of raindrops to represent the weather.
  Hurricane card: This card goes into the weather deck, when it appears, it's bad news!
  Status cards: Double-sided cards which displayed the poisoned status for people unfortunate to be poisoned and on the flip side show the dead status for really unfortunate players.
  Raft cards: When the players manage to build a raft, they get a raft card.
• Cardholder: A fantastically unnecessary but excellent little card holder for the wreckage deck.
• Wooden balls: Used to manage both hunting for fish and scavenging for wood. There are 6 of them, each one shows 1-3 fish and one is black.
• Bag: This looks like a hemp bag and is used to blindly draw the wooden balls.
• Tokens: There are distinctly shaped tokens for the game's 3 types of resources, a water drop for water, a fish token for food and errr, a disc for wood?

Only the cards are what I would consider average in build production, which is to say, they're fine. The tokens feel suitable chunky, as do the balls and bag (Sic) which are a nice touch. The standout component is the completely superfluous cardholder which displays like the wrecked hull of a half sunken ship.

Hellagapos makes use of excellent bright and colourful artwork throughout, especially on the cards. With thick black lines and lots of colour it has an almost ligne claire quality to it. Furthermore, there's also a lot of humorous subtext to the art. Like the pendulum that makes another player take a one action of their chosen by the card-player (Hypnotises them!) and so on.

There's minimal iconography in the game and what there is, such as water or fish icons ​are easy to comprehend. Actions on the survivor cards are all detailed by text instead.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Game board: Put out the game board.
  Resources: Put the food and water tokens on their starting positions on the resource track as determined by the player count.
  Raft track: Put the wood token on to the 0 spot on the raft track.
  Raft deck: Put out the raft deck adjacent to the board.
• Weather deck: Shuffle the weather deck and draw 5 cards into a face-down deck.
  Now shuffle the hurricane card into this deck.
  Place the deck (Now with 6 cards.) face-down on to the weather card space on the board.
  Put the remaining weather cards on top off the 6 cards.
  This means the hurricane card will appear somewhere in the last half of the weather deck.
• Wooden balls: Put all 6 wooden balls into the bag and give it a vigorous shake.
• Wreckage cards: Shuffle the wreckage cards into a face-down deck. Deal 3 or 4 to each player as per player count.
  Put the remaining cards into the cardholder.
• First Player: Determine a start player.

On to play
Hellapagos uses a normal turn structure with the active player taking their turn before play progresses to the player to their left.
The game has 4 basic actions a player can perform but because it's a cooperative game, there can be a lot of discussion about moves and strategies among players and later, negotiation taking place.
A round represents 'a day' and plays as follows

• Weather: Any previous weather is discarded and the active player flips over a weather card which will set the rainfall for the day which depicted as raindrops. This might be 0 or all the way up to 3 raindrops.
  In the latter half of the game, the hurricane card may appear, more on this below.
• Actions: Now, starting with the first player, each person takes 1 of the actions below.
  • Catch fish: The active player blindly pulls a wooden ball from the bag, the number of fish displayed on the ball is how many fish they collected and the food token on the resource track is increased accordingly.
  • Collect water: For their action, the active play may choose to collect water. The amount collected will be dependent on the current weather card and thus will be between 0-3. Obviously collecting water when there are 0 raindrops on the weather card is a pointless, conversely, collecting water when there are 3 raindrops would allow them to move the water token up the resource track by 3.
  • Collect wood/build raft: When collecting wood, there is some risk attached.
    First, the active player should advance the wood token 1 space along the raft track.
    After this, the active player must decide if they want to risk collecting more wood. If they decide to collect more, they must announce how much they are collecting (Between 1-5.). Then they must blindly draw that many wooden balls from the bag.
    Black balled!: If any of the wooden balls that are pulled from the bag is the black ball, then the player is immediately poisoned and they do not collect any wood. More on poisoning below. If all the balls are white, they avoided the pesky snakes that inhabit the forest, collecting the full amount amount of wood that they announced and moving the wood token along the raft track and equal amount.
    Building rafts: Once the 6th piece of wood is collected (The wood token reaches 6 on the raft track.) then the active player has finished a raft! Place a raft card on the corresponding space on the board.
  • Search wreckage: The active player can spend their action to draw a wreckage card from the deck.
    There are 2 types of wreckage card; permanent and ongoing. Wreckage cards can generally be played by their controlling player at any time or in response to another player's action or card regardless of what type they are. Although their effect will occur after an announced action. (There are no 'interrupts' here!)
    Furthermore cards can be played face-up to try and intimidate or face-down to bluff as well as kept secret.
    Permanent: Some cards have ongoing effects, to make use of them, they must be played in front of the controlling player. Even though they are permanent
    Single use: These are one-and-done, players can keep these in their hand until they decide to use them.
    Wreckage cards have a broad number of functions, from helping the group to helping (Or harming!) an individual or even influencing voting. 
• Next player: Once the active player has taken their action, play progresses to their left.
• End of round/day: When a players have taken their actions, the following occurs:
  Consume water: Move the water token down the resource track by a number of spaces equal to the number of current players. If this would take the token to lower than 0, then the players have a problem. This means that 1 or more players will need to be eliminated from the game, the exact number will be equal to how much more water would be needed. E.g., if 7 players only have 4 water on the resource track, 3 players would have to be eliminated. This is done through voting (See below.), the game also provides various methods to eliminate players via wreckage cards.
  Consume food: This is mechanically identical to consuming water but for the food resource.
  Check victory conditions: Once water and food have been dealt with, players should check to see if they meet victory conditions.
  New first player: Once a round is over and the victory conditions have not been met, the player to the left of the first player becomes new first player for the subsequent round.
• Voting: This occurs when there isn't enough food or water and a player needs to be eliminated. The first player counts to 3 and all players simultaneously point at the player they want to eliminate. Whoever has the most fingers pointing at them is out!
  If an eliminated player has been hoarding a ration card that would provide the required resource, they can discard if after the vote to save themselves, although they may attract the irritation of other players by hording it in the first place. Alternatively, another player may choose to save them with a wreckage card.
• Poison: A player may become poisoned from searching for wood or eating or drinking bad rations. Regardless of the source, the effect is the same.
  Firstly, a poisoned character cannot participate in voting while they are sick, then in the following round, their only action can be to remove the poisoned status.
• Elimination: If a player is eliminated, then that's it, they're are out of the rest of the game. After this, their remaining wreck cards must be redistributed.
  All permanent cards they had in play - except a gun are discarded from play. The gun is returned to the eliminated player's hand.
  If a player was eliminated by voting, the cards they had in hand are distributed between their neighbours.
  If they were eliminated by another player, then that player gets all the wreckage cards.
• Hurricane: When the hurricane card appears, it marks the beginning of the end. The game will finish at the end of the current round, players must leave on any rafts they've built along with their water and food rations.

Endgame
There 3 ways Hellapagos can end.

• Check for victory: At the end of every round, the players must check if they meet the victory conditions.
  Victory condition: Once water and food have been consumed for the round, if the remaining water, food and rafts are at least equal to the current number of players, then they sail to safety.
  If all players got away, congratulations are in order, it is, in my opinion very difficult to achieve this.
  It's a likely occurrence that eliminating some players freed up resources to escape, if so, then the escapees can be considered the winners.
• Hurricane: When the hurricane card has appeared, players must leave the island at the end of the round if they can. They'll need the requisite water, food and rafts for this as per the victory conditions.
  It means players must be eliminated until their numbers are low enough to allow the remaining player to get away.
  Again, any survivors who get away can be considered winners.
  If players cannot leave the island on rafts for any reason... then see below:
• Total loss: If no players can leave on a raft after the hurricane hits, then everybody loses!
  If all the players manage to starve or die of thirst, goes without saying that it's a total loss.

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Overall
There's a lot to unpack with Hellapagos and I'll start with the mechanics.
The write-up is a little long and belies the fact that in play, the game is pretty straight foward to understand and play.
More importantly; it's clear that the game's mathematics have been balanced so that it's very hard to get all players off the island. Which makes sense from a game-perspective, it forces players to consider different late-game strategies.

If say, a group of 6 players had 9 days to get off the island, they'd need the following.
Water: 6 per day +6 to leave -12, which is their starting water. So 48 water.
Food: 6 per day +6 to leave - 10, which is their starting food, so 50 food.
Rafts: At 6 wood per raft, they'll need 36 wood.
In other words 5.4 water per day, 5.5 food per day, 4 wood per day.
If the player split their labour evenly per task, that would mean:
2 players getting 2.7 water per day each.
2 players getting 2.75 food per day each.
2 players getting 2 wood per day each.

Getting both water and food at that rate is pretty hard. Each player would essentially have to get 3 or their chosen resource per day, every day. Since 3 is the top end result players could hope for, it's unlikely this will occur.
Getting 2 wood per day per player seems easy but each player has a 16% chance of being poisoned, this might not seem high but when it does occur, it means that they only get 1 wood and lose their next action. Catching up in a following round mean getting 5 wood, this is a lot more tricky.
Of course players may want to search the wreckage and rightfully so, there are some very useful cards to be found in there, including for example; cards that skip the consume food action among others. On the other hand, it's equally as likely that something which helps a player personally might be found...

Players may want to divide their labour differently as well; when lots of rain appears, it might be good to get more people gathering water and 'get 'ahead' on the water track.
A game like Hellapagos thrives on player social interaction, if people don't engage with it, it won't be a particularly interesting or memorable game.

Ultimately though, players will sooner or later come to a conclusion; there won't be enough resources for all the players to get off the island.

This changes the game in 2 ways.
Firstly, players will begin looking at who to vote off as food and water become scarcer. Players will try to emphasise their own usefulness and see who can be a good target for  elimination during voting.
This is where having a valuable item can keep a player alive. Some ongoing cards are very handy and eliminating the player who controls it, also eliminates the item. Not a coincidence in the rules I think.
Additionally, players may also look to horde rations on wreckage cards, waiting until voting has occurred, allowing others to be eliminated and only using it when they have been voted out. However, other players can look at this very negatively and it can draw their ire.
players are free to form alliances or betray one another, gang up on other players, openly or otherwise and so on.
Needless to say negotiation and voting can become very tense.

Secondly, people will start to realise that when player counts are sufficiently low, that eliminating players after collecting resources can leave the survivors with enough resources to escape the island.
The thing is though; it's likely that they'll be enough food and water to prevent any voting from going ahead. Players will have to resort to 'other methods' to removing opponents.
This is where the game gets brutal and the pistols start getting used.

Hellapagos mixes cooperative game play with a large dose of 'take that' actions. In the early-game it's all pleasant enough but once it progresses on, everything can change.

I, like many other people I imagine, am not a fan of games that have player elimination, luckily for Hellapagos, players won't generally spend too long just watching. It doesn't frequently occur early in the game and once the eliminations start, they don't stop until the game does!
I will also add; if game with lots of direct 'in-your-face' conflict and player elimination aren't your thing, it would prudent to give Hellapagos a miss.

but if this sort of thing is your jam, then with it's 12-player count! Hellapagos is a good game to try.