Captain Sonar: Someone finally made a great 8p board game (2024)

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The greatest temptation when playing Captain Sonar doesn’t come during the game itself. It comes when you’re trying to find another seven people to play. You’ll want to call this a party game version of Battleship—and that’s an apt description. Like the best party games, Captain Sonar features a wonderful mix of yelling, cooperation, deception, role-playing, deduction, and speed. And, like Battleship, you put your naval vessel on a grid and hope the other team doesn’t luck into finding it.

But don’t fall into the temptation. Nobody wants to play a group variant of Battleship any more than they want to play a group variant of Candyland. Instead, tell people that Captain Sonar is a great submarine-themed party game. Gamers will go in thinking of Subterfuge. Gen-Xers will launch into their worst impression of Sean Connery’s “Russian” accent in The Hunt for Red October. That one guy in every game group will start arguing that Kelsey Grammer’s 1996 Down Periscope was superior to Das Boot.

Allow this. It will give you the 30 seconds you need to set up this simple but brilliant game of “hide and seek and blow up.”

Battle stations

Teams are divided into four roles, each armed with only a dry erase marker and a special laminated sheet. The captain’s job is in some ways the easiest: the main task is just to move the sub around your mapped grid of dots, avoiding islands and disguising your location and path as best you can. On each move, you have to announce the direction journeyed (north, east, south, west) but not your location.

There’s one major complication: you can never cross over your sub’s path. My fellow players wondered why the game is set in the year 2048, since it has no real futuristic aspect. The best I could come up with is that it explains the path-crossing rule. In the future, subs can be operated by a crew of four but run on whatever powered Tron’s light cycles.

The captain would be unwise to chart a course without listening to his crew, however. The engineer’s pleas are probably the most urgent. Subs of the future are surprisingly flimsy. With each movement, the engineer “tracks a breakdown.” If the sub moves north, for example, the engineer must mark off one of five or six symbols in the “north” quadrant on his sheet. Cross out all five symbols in one quadrant and your sub takes a hit of damage. You sink at a mere four hits, so heading in one direction for too long can be a costly decision.

Even worse, any time you mark a symbol, you render one of your sub’s systems inoperable. Cross off just one of the six weapons icons and you’ve lost the ability to fire torpedoes or drop mines. Cross off a sonar symbol and you’ve made it much harder to find your opponent. A limited number of radiation symbols won’t damage systems—but cross all of them out and you suffer some sort of Spock-like radiation incident and take a hit of damage.

Fortunately, there are two ways to repair your damage—which is to say you get to erase your engineering marks. Most of the damage symbols are connected by a “circuit;” three icons in the west quadrant connect to one in the east quadrant, for example. Cross out all four and they become completely healthy again. (I’m less mechanically oriented than the typical Ars reader, but I’m pretty sure this means that circuits work differently in 2048 than they do in 2016.)

You can also erase all of the marks on the engineer’s slate by convincing the captain to surface the submarine. The captain may very much like this idea because he will get to erase that uncrossable Snake-like line he’s been drawing on his map with each move. But it’s a risky decision, too, since surfacing allows the other team to take several additional moves.

The first mate is essentially the reverse of the engineer. She’s eager to make marks on her page, since these bring various systems online. Unlike the engineer, the first mate’s marks don’t have to directly correspond to the direction the submarine is heading. Two moves could ready a mine. Three might ready a torpedo. With five, you could prepare “silent” mode, which lets the captain move the sub up to four spaces in any one direction—without having to announce to the other team which direction it was. Location devices (sonar, drones) also force the other team to give you clues about where their sub might be.

The trick, of course, is that the first mate can’t actually use any of those great tools if the engineer has crossed off even one of the corresponding symbols on his own sheet. So the captain, first mate, and engineer must together chart a course that will keep certain systems online without sending the sub into the rocks—and without giving away the sub’s position by too obviously avoiding those rocks.

And that’s where the radio operator comes in. The radio operator’s sole job is to listen to the opposing team’s captain and chart enemy sub movements on a clear sheet of plastic that overlays the map. After 10 moves or so, the radio operator should be able to deduce the opposing sub’s location by shifting this overlay around. A few sonar or drone maneuvers (or a few bad moves by the opposing captain) will narrow the location down even faster.

The radio operator is essentially the goalie, focused more on the other team’s moves than on your own, and any mistakes here are costlier. The engineer crossed off a symbol, thereby disabling a system the first mate was hoping to use? No worries. It’s fixable in a couple more moves or by surfacing. But if the radio operator marks “east” when the opposing captain actually goes “west” (as happened in one of my games)? Or misses a move altogether? The mistake might not be clear until after your boat sinks, and there’s not much team members can do to mitigate the problem.

That’s basically the game. Find the other sub. Shoot them with torpedoes or drive them near your mines. The first sub to four damage points loses. It’s delightfully stressful and loads of fun even in that first learning game. Five different maps, several with slightly different rules, keep the game unpredictable and challenging (in an arctic map, for example, you’ll suffer damage for surfacing except at a few scarce open water holes).

But once eight people have the hang of the game, it turns on its head and gets really fun.

Full speed ahead

The basic form of Captain Sonar is turn-based. Team A’s captain announces a heading and marks it on the map, then the first mate and engineer each respond “Okay” (or better, “Aye, Captain!”) and make their marks. Team B’s radio operator then marks this move, and Team B’s captain announces a heading.

It sounds simple and it is. It can also drag on. My first few games took place during my workplace’s informal game lunch hour. We made it (with basic instructions) before the hour was up—but barely. In the slight rush, a few mistakes were made. Torpedoes were fired blindly into the deep. Clues were missed.

Later, I played in the evenings with multiple groups of friends. These games went considerably more than an hour as team members lobbied their captain for certain directions, argued about possible locations of their opponents, weighed offensive strategies vs. defensive ones, and played a kind of deliberate water chess. Great fun, but it ate up game night.

Captain Sonar’s true form, however, is as a free-for-all “real time” game. As soon as Team A’s first mate and engineer respond “Okay!”, Team A’s captain can move the sub again. You don’t wait for the other side. Hasty decisions might send systems offline, but quick planning can get you in range of your opponents, let you fire off a torpedo, and then scurry away before they have a chance to retaliate.

It’s not just one loud, ongoing speed game, however. Any time a system is activated—to drop a mine, for example, or to activate sonar—the captain or first mate calls “Stop!” and announces what system they’re using. Once that move is acknowledged, the chaos resumes.

It’s during surfacing that the “real time” playtesting becomes obvious. In turn-based play, the surfacing team simply waits for the other team to make three moves. (The other team can also surface at any point during its three moves, which cancels the waiting period. This advantage encourages each team to wait for the other team to surface first, creating a game of “chicken.”)

In real-time mode, though, the surfacing team takes the engineer’s map of the submarine and has each team member carefully trace the outline of one section of the ship, staying carefully within the lines. Not since kindergarten has coloring in the lines been so important. Once all four sections have been traced and initialed by all four players, the drawing gets passed to the opposing engineer for inspection. Only if all is in order can the submarine dive again and resume play.

During this mad dash of tracing, the non-surfacing team continues its movements. If it's fast enough, it can get in more than three moves. As a bonus, the surfaced team’s radio operator can’t write down those moves until his own sub is back underwater.

Yes, it’s bedlam. And yes, early on, real-time games are less about which team has the best strategy than about which team makes the fewest errors. The radio operator is so busy marking movements that he hardly has time to shift his transparent sheet around the map to eliminate possible routes. The engineer will plead with the captain to move north to complete a circuit; the captain will respond that she can’t go north—and thus give away her position to the other team. The first mate will look despairingly at all the cool tools he can’t deploy.

You’ll forget that submarines are the “silent service” as you start to lobby loudly for the next course of action. Chances are good that the radio operator will complain that everyone is being too loud except for the opposing team’s captain, who is speaking too quietly.

Still, there’s more strategy at work in the real-time version of Captain Sonar than you find in many real-time games like Escape: The Curse of the Temple or FUSE. Speed helps, but it can also force you to reveal your location too quickly. And if your team isn’t communicating well, you’re likely to blow up parts of your ship with too many engineer markings. Slow and steady may survive longer.

Eight is great. Less is less.

My first draft of this review had a major caution: this game, I argued, was really only good with eight players. But after several more plays, I’m less convinced that Captain Sonar truly requires eight.

Nevertheless, I remain convinced that this is an eight-player game that loses some appeal as you lose players. And it’s a game where uneven teams (four vs. three, for example) create too much imbalance for the larger team to feel good about winning.

With less than eight players, at least one person has to fill two roles. This dramatically increases playtime, increases the chance of player error, or both. With my lunchtime group committed to finishing a turn-based game in less than an hour, six-person games each ended with, “Oh, I see where you marked the wrong thing down” instead of “Yay! We won!” And somehow in two consecutive turn-based games, one team ended up taking several more turns than the other. No one wants to end a game with a shrug and say, “Oh well, it was still fun.”

But I also played several evening games with less than eight (one with four, another with six, both turn-based). They went great; they just took longer. As players carefully plotted their courses or deliberated their markings, I had ample time to ponder whether we could try a real-time game. It might have worked, if each team didn’t worry too much about maximizing their movements. But the likelihood of game-breaking error seemed too high for us to spend another hour or so attempting it.

If I had exactly seven other gamers to play with, there’s no other game I’d rather bring to the table right now than Captain Sonar. It’s as easy to teach as the most casual of party games, with a remarkably fast setup. The replay value is remarkably high; changing maps or even just moving people to different positions makes for very different experiences. And it’s the kind of game that experienced gamers and newbies can play together with a fair bit of success, since teamwork is paramount.

It’s easy to see why this was such a hit at 2016 game conventions like Gen Con, where there were always enough folks to join in. And to be honest, there are few great games designed to work best with eight players, especially if you don’t love social deduction games.

But how often do I have exactly seven people to play with? If just one person is a no-show, I’m likely to set this aside in favor of something like 7 Wonders, The Resistance, or One Night Werewolf. If a ninth person shows up, someone has to sit on the sidelines.

Still, at a $50 list price there’s an awful lot of game here, even if I can rarely get a group of precisely eight together. And the turn-based version still makes a decent six-player (or even four-player) team strategy game.

Captain Sonar costs about three times as much as Hasbro’s current version of Battleship, but it’s easily more than three times as fun. As Kelsey Grammer said in the immortal classic Down Periscope, “Board the boat. I like a challenge.”

Ted Olsen is director of editorial development at Christianity Today magazine.