Today on “Decent, But Massively Overrated Cooperative Campaign Games” we have The 7th Continent. Real talk, it seems like all it takes these days to garner universal praise and shoot up the BGG rankings like an express elevator is a couple clever gimmicks and an expensive Kickstarter. It’s by no means terrible, but The 7th Continent is about as mixed a bag as I’ve ever seen. Interesting one minute, groan-worthy the next; constantly building anticipation, then clumsily deflating itself. It’s loaded with creativity and promise, but bloated by repetitive mechanisms, dumb puzzles, egregious admin, and terrible pacing. So many disparate ideas are crammed into the game alongside one another that it seems like whether or not they actually worked well together was secondary to sheer volume. And, like Gloomhaven beside it, the video game wannabe vibes here are off the charts. Alas, though I do agree there is a lot about The 7th Continent to be impressed by, it’s hard for me to be super enthusiastic about a game that every one of my experiences with has been more arduous than fun.
In theory, The 7th Continent is a co-operative exploration/survival game. In practice, it feels more like a filing cabinet simulator. Reason being, the players must build the board of The 7th Continent as they play using hundreds and hundreds of numbered-and-color-coordinated cards that they must keep carefully organized with trays and dividers. And not just for the board, these cards are used for practically everything in this game: skills, items, health, experience points, random encounters, puzzles, you name it — but let’s get back to the board. The spaces of the island the players can inhabit are represented by “Terrain Cards”, which depict the surrounding area and the actions the players can take there. If there are animal tracks, the players can attempt to hunt; if there’s a cliff, players can attempt to climb it, and so on and so forth. These cards also list the numbers and placement of additional terrain cards adjacent to the players’ location that they can move to. However, each time the players attempt to investigate a new terrain card they must first draw and resolve an “Exploration Card”, which contain random events that can either help or harm their situation (finding an unexpected stash of items, getting temporarily lost in the jungle or attacked by spiders, you get the idea). Most game events give you even more actions you can take, and every action in the game requires the players to spend a certain amount of energy in an attempt to achieve a certain amount of successes. Energy is tracked by a shared “Action Deck”, which is a stack of cards representing various skills the players can learn. In addition to these skills, every card in the action deck also lists a number of successes in the form of stars or half-stars. Thus, an action that requires 3 or more energy and 4 or more successes would task the players with deciding how many cards they think they would need to flip (to a minimum of 3 in this case) to achieve a total of 4 stars between them. It’s a standard risk-reward proposal where you need to continuously walk the line between playing it safe by choosing enough cards to guarantee your success and conserving your energy by not overspending. Likely influencing these decisions are the consequences of failing that particular action, which range from nothing to horrible and include all sorts of nasty status effects that can be inflicted on your character.
Another consideration to make when taking actions are the skills on the cards that are turned over. Every time the players take an action they are allowed to choose one of the revealed skills and add it to their hands. Skills let players craft items, heal, fight better, and all the other sorts of things you would expect from the type of game this is. Some skills are character-specific, some have to be purchased with experience points at certain game locations (which are awarded sporadically to the players for performing various actions), but most are just basic skills that are available to any player whenever they take an action. The skills themselves are easy enough to use and the way crafting items works is clever, both in how you can lower the cost of the crafting action by discovering natural resources in your environment and also how you can fashion related items together into multi-purpose tools. That’s all cool; the problem with skills is the way they are acquired. Tying incessant and random card draws to the skills your characters can potentially learn is both thematically nonsensical and incredibly disruptive to the pacing of the game. It is silliness of the silliest degree that the idea of how to craft snowshoes occurs to your characters completely arbitrarily and not, I don’t know, when they are stuck in the snow and could really use some snowshoes. Also, having to stop in the middle of nearly every single action to determine if any of the skills you just drew are worth keeping gets tedious after about 20 minutes, and this game is a lot, lot, lot, lot longer than 20 minutes!
On the flip side, one neat thing about the game is how turn order works. Each action is a turn and players can take turns in any order and in any amount they want as long as they all agree. They can take actions together as a group to reduce energy costs — though the need for team coordination increases the number of successes required — or split up to explore independently and cover more ground. It’s a very natural idea that I hope is included in more co-operative games going forward as it reduces rules-related table talk and helps you focus on the task at hand (if only every aspect of this game was designed with such goals in mind). It’s a highly effective thematic abstraction as well. “I just finished my new bow and arrow. It’s perfect. Stay put while I go get us some food.” And as that player spends a few turns hunting, the others sit, waiting nervously, probably hoping they had a weapon of their own to help out, and praying they won’t have to go hungry. Such circumstances arise and organize themselves completely organically, which is pretty interesting. Anything that helps keep the friction in the fiction and out of the system is a win in my book.
Alright, so what in the heck are you actually trying to do in The 7th Continent? Well, its plot revolves around a group of adventurers who have recently returned from an expedition to the mysterious 7th Continent only to find themselves packing a little extra baggage on the trip home — they’re cursed! Thus, they journey back to the land that afflicted them where it is the players’ mission to survive long enough to find a way to lift the curse(s) they’ve been stricken with. You start off with a single clue for each of the curses you choose to play with (so you’re not completely aimless) and then left to figure the rest out on your own. The theme of the game is great, its call to adventure immediate, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. First and foremost, the decision to structure the game as a continuous adventure much like a video game, complete with the ability to “save” when you wish to take a break, was a poor one. The amount of weird hoops the game has to jump through to get such an idea to work causes a huge amount of additional administrative overhead that is not worth the trade off in the slightest. Every time the players take a break (or even just switch over to exploring a different map), guess what happens? They lose all of the progress of their exploration. They have the memories of where they need to go next and their items and skills and whatnot, but every random encounter in the entire map repopulates and you have to slowly rebuild the map of the game card by card all over again. What a pain! It actually incentivizes you to not take breaks, which isn’t great, not only because it defeats the entire purpose of the feature in the first place, but because long play sessions reveal how tedious and repetitive the game is. Let’s just say the ninth time you go hunting in a single play session — because it’s the only semi-reliable way to replenish your energy in the game — is a lot less exciting than the first.
The problems don’t end there. Much of playing The 7th Continent is trial-and-error of the very worst kind. Completing your objectives is less about strategy than it is a color-by-numbers where the game refuses to tell you what colors go with what numbers unless you happened to have taken the right action at the right location and gotten the right result. And already knowing what you’re supposed to do is even worse, reducing the entire experience to weakly going through the motions until you eventually catch back up to where you died. Oh yeah that’s right, you can die in this game and when you do you’re supposed to go all the way back to the beginning. Dude, this isn’t a video game. I can’t hit a reset button and be ready to go again in a second or two. Flipping over cards and reading flavor text isn’t immersive or stimulating enough to sufficiently entertain me a second time through. And don’t even get me started on those embarrassing puzzle designs ripped straight out of Highlights For Children. I’m supposed to put up with those another time? Not in this life. It’s one thing to suffer the never-ending administrative tasks and monotonous action resolutions the game asks of you when the carrot stick of discovery is dangling just in front of you, but trudging through almost entirely identical content all over again in the hopes that you are able to progress a little further is just laborious. And again, the game is so heavily steeped in trial-and-error that it’s highly unlikely you will emerge victorious on your first attempt. Ugh. It’s never a good sign when the main ingredient in a game’s recipe for success is how much of it you have memorized.
I honestly think a lot of the praise The 7th Continent gets is due to the fact that it even works, that its core system manages to chug steadily along without being obviously broken. It’s hard to deny that the system powering the game’s architecture is clever and robust — I especially like how as the playing area expands with more and more cards it creates a sprawling visual interspersed with picture-in-picture close-ups that make your table look like a pulpy comic book come to life — but its a system that has been misapplied in a number of ways. What’s most frustrating is that a lot of these problems come down to its unnecessarily huge scope more than anything. I could easily see the same cards-do-everything, build-the-board-as-you-go, explore-and-survive adventuring module work wonders in a series of self-contained 1-2 hour adventures. Heck, bundle up three or four of those and you have a campaign on your hands! I don’t understand what The 7th Continent supposedly gains by being a turgid, never-ending mess where you’re expected to lose a ton of your progress because you want to take a break. Not to mention its slow pacing, repetitive cadence, lack of depth, and gaps in player agency become all too apparent when encountered across long sessions. There’s no escaping it. Darned if you do, darned if you don’t. The designers of The 7th Continent‘s colossal over-estimation of the strength of their ideas has turned what should have been a fresh and inventive adventure/survival game into something that instead feels strangely like the characters that inhabit its fictional domain: cursed.
The 7th Continent gets a rating of THREE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHWHILE.