Death From Below
Designers: Ed Ostermeyer & Jeremy White
Player count: 1
Publisher: GMT Games
(Yes, the designer count outweighs the player count here. Only the first of many unusual things about this game.)
The year is 1862 and the Civil War rages on across the land. The infamous battles that erupt during that fateful year form a sadly familiar list: Second Bull Run, Antietam, Shiloh... joined by a few maritime endeavors very few are even aware of.
Now, before we go any further, allow me step into the confines of this here confessional.
As a history nut and avid wargamer with a penchant for the American Civil War, I thought I was rather well read when it came to that turbulent period in US history. I had digested tome after tome on that topic (and I strongly recommend the late Shelby Foote's spellbinding three-volume history of the conflict) and played countless games that took me all over the country—hell, I've even visited several of the battlefields myself, and that includes retracing the steps of Pickett's charge near Gettysburg on the 150th anniversary of that terrible battle. Sure, I'd heard all about those newfangled ironclads (ships sheathed in metal!) but I'd never come across mentions of submarines—let me repeat this: SUBMARINES—taking part in the fighting. Then GMT announced they were toiling on a solitaire game called Infernal Machine and I had to retrieve my jaw from the floor.
I shall at this moment proceed to kneel with humility and say three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers as penance for this sin by ignorance, while you go on your merry way and read through the rest of this review.
But why start at the beginning like vulgar peasants?
Anyone who's played a Jeremy White game before won't be surprised, upon exploring this one, to discover that you have to learn to swim before you can even walk.
Take a Deep Breath
To wit: the game first throws you into the deep end (or, shall we say, below shallow), where your terrified crew find themselves crammed into one of those submerged "fishboats," cranking a propeller—oftentimes by hand!—until your strange vessel reaches its target and attempts to bring about its downfall.
All while trying not to get shot at, as you might have fathomed.
Armed with an explosive device attached to the end of a spar (imagine a long stick) which itself has been fastened to the prow of your craft, you need to navigate, preferably undetected, close enough to detonate your charge. Will the deflagration take out your objective, and perhaps your very own lives as well? You see, concussion is a real, horrible prospect, and many a fishboat—successful though it might have been—was never seen again.
Or maybe you'll be tasked with towing said charge at the end of a long rope, wherein the expectations are for your fishboat to pass under the target and detonate your weapon once it more or less reaches its intended destination.
Or else you'll need to send one of your men outside, stepping away from the fishboat's airlock (the technology actually predates the Civil War) wearing a diving suit, making sure the air hose connecting him to his vessel doesn't get kinked or tangled, and not swimming but walking at the bottom of the lake or river all the while CARRYING an explosive charge until he reaches the target, delivers the package, and then hurries back (well, yeah...) before detonating the bomb.
Now who's muttering one or two Our Fathers on the side?
Through this "tactical" segment, few decisions are required on your part. You'll decide whether you're inching closer to your target, whether you want to blow the charge you're carrying now or wait for a better timing (that may never come), or possibly opt to hightail it out of there if things take a turn for the worse. But overall, this stands more as a resolution step that brings together everything you've prepared for in one explosive moment.
Do not judge the entire game by this tiny sliver of experience: it's the rough equivalent of a conversion kick after a long and successful drive across the football field. What came before could fill an ocean. Or at the very least Charleston Harbor, right next to Fort Sumter.
Hold it In
Then, as you progress through the catalog of scenarios, the game requires that you take a step back and look at the overall mission upon which your valiant crew (and their unreliable machine) has embarked.
Leaving your port of call on the indicated mission board, you sail—underwater or otherwise, the choice is yours—against or with the tide, navigating the confluence of the Patience River and the Panic Canal while attempting to achieve the unheard-of before your vessel is declared lost with all hands.
Will you ask your brave souls to crank frantically and fight the tide (improving the effectiveness of your maneuvering but depleting your crew's energy) or just go with the flow at the risk of—well, everything?
Of course, once the enemy detects your presence, priorities change and trousers get soaked, and not just with water. Finding oneself under attack never fails to take a toll on already frayed nerves, and experiencing the same while aboard a prototypical submersible will not make things any easier. Fatigue sets in, terror (and then panic!) threatens to take over, all of it increasingly limiting your options. And you know what? All of this might happen (and indeed, it will) before your crew's presence is even detected. Underwater life often goes unnoticed; death even more so.
Until that soggy end, however, do your level best to manage your position as well as your elevation (careful when entering those shallow waters), and make sure you come up for air—and a much-needed dose of nerve calming—once in a while. With some determination and a little luck, you might just end up spotting a worthy target and then decide to risk the lives of your crew in order to undermine theirs.
But don't wait too long: the mission board quickly becomes a nasty push-your-luck device where time is your primary enemy. The above-mentioned fatigue and terror could do you in by themselves, but did I mention malfunctions and leaks? The dreaded Navigation and Discovery Cards, drawn during their respective turn steps, dispense most of the nasty surprises that will befall your crew, and you will need to allocate your efforts accordingly. Are your men cranking? Steering? Targeting? Or perhaps you want them to set all of that aside for a moment and concentrate on repairs—assuming you even have someone on board who knows how to handle a wrench.
You could be successful in your mission even if you never make it back home.
Try to find some solace in that.
Take the Plunge
Here's where the whole military enterprise shifts in an unexpected direction. (Don't act so surprised: you had to know you weren't out of the underwater woods yet.) The next handful of scenarios—the last ones before you're sent out on your own—require that you take a one last step back and look at the complete picture.
This is, finally, the campaign game.
And here's where the adventure truly begins. But you are not a military commander: you're an inventor. You will need to secure financing, build your fishboat from scratch, recruit crew members crazy enough to enlist for a potential burial at sea, and then send the cursed thing out there to accomplish one military mission or another, all the while dealing with contracts and new investors to keep your shop afloat. So make sure you can afford to keep building, go on subsequent (and, sadly, inevitable) recruitment drives, and try to maintain some measure of influence over how and where your contraption gets used—which turns out to be easier if you work for the Confederacy than if you decided to side with the Union, where your efforts will be absorbed by the national war machine.
Of course, the road to wherever you're going will not unspool in a neat, straight line. Special occurrences (appropriately called here "Fortunes of War") might hinder or assist your efforts, and the Almanac booklets—one for each side in the conflict—offer, deliciously, a different results table for each season of every year of the war.
From then on, the world is your oyster: you get to pick actions from a generous menu (one of which is Missions, amply discussed above) until you reach your allocation of Actions for that turn. When the time is up, that season's event acts like a coda to your shenanigans, and a new season rolls around.
Your campaign reaches a conclusion in 1865 (perhaps earlier if you're playing on the side of the Confederacy), and our trusty Almanacs provide closure in the form of Outcomes, doled out along three axes: Prospects (what's to become of you and your work right after the war), Effectiveness (an assessment of developments spawning from your successes and failures), and Legacy (your impact on history, and specifically submarine history).
The procedure creates a more rounded narrative conclusion than your typical VP total checked against a victory table, which, I feel, truly befits this peculiar game.
 |
| The campaign game in full swing |
WAR PRODUCTION
The sheer tonnage of stuff that ships with Infernal Machine would suffice to anchor the average sloop. Counter sheets, an assortment of card decks, dozens of wooden cubes, and three dice—that's all fine. Now the game boards: one tactical board, two mission boards plus one gauges board, all mounted and all double-sided. Then cardboard support elements in the form of a pair of submarine displays (for training purposes), as well as three super handy player aid folders.
And, finally, the booklets.
You've got the 60-page Rule Book, where everything springs from. You've also got the 60-page Scenarios book, replete with 10 scenarios and a healthy serving of fully illustrated examples. There is also another 60-ish-page book called the Cyclopedia, which doubles as a rules supplement and a historical companion; basically, if you want to dig a little deeper into any of the game concepts—both in terms of rules and actual historical facts—then the Cyclopedia is your companion. Rounding out the package are the two slightly thinner, aforementioned Almanacs: one for the USA and one for the CSA.
The amount of research here is positively insane: every bit of rules documentation is accompanied by historical notes (or else full-fledged treatises!) that ensure you emerge from your adventures a little more learned each time. How about a bio of every historical figure represented in the game? It's all in there.
The amount of errata has been kept to a minimum (and corrected documents are updated on the GMT Games site on a regular basis), and the green cubes that show up in the box were originally meant to be turquoise.
That's it for mishaps. Pretty remarkable, considering the scope of this production.
 |
| Pages? We've got pages. |
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Contrary to what it may look like, Infernal Machine is an easy game to learn.
No, you do not need to read all 60 pages of rules before you launch into your first game. I mean, you could certainly read the entire thing and set up a campaign right then and there, but the game was built to be learned one step at a time, in reverse. This ensures that you understand how everything you're preparing for will unfold; otherwise you'll find yourself making decisions on a whim during campaign planning, because you can't grasp the significance of a long spar or imagine the ill effects of an unlucky concussion roll.
So do take it one step at a time, and walk backwards.
Mind you, playing through every single scenario is not a requirement. Once you get the gist of it, feel free to skip ahead, or perhaps read through the detailed examples to confirm that you've correctly digested that new batch of concepts and mechanics.
FUN FACTOR
The game offers a unique thrill, but that will not emerge from the first handful of scenarios. The tactical board will feel constrained, indeed insignificant; the mission board will provide a wider strategic outlook while at the same time fostering a sort of "is that it?" feeling; only the campaign game, with its gauges board and all-encompassing array of possibilities, will clear the last hurdle to a truly satisfying game experience. And what an experience!
Each session puts you before agonizing decisions that echo down several layers. Wheels within wheels. At the same time, you'll keep encountering storytelling moments—and I'm not talking about those games where all you do is roll on results tables and read about what happens to your crew. Not at all. Everything that takes place on your adventures contributes to the mechanical puzzle you must solve to succeed, but also tells an engrossing story of personal achievements and local tragedies, while at the same time connecting with the threads of history on a higher level.
Tactical scenarios felt intriguing, in an I-wonder-what-led-to-this kind of way. Mission scenarios really hit home: the terror is real. When your fishboat starts accumulating leaks and malfunctions, and your crew is riddled with fatigue/terror/panic markers, you start looking for an escape hatch yourself. I remember the feeling of dread that gripped me when, on my first mission, I realized my fishboat and its crew could freeze up in terror and sink to an early death before they even reached any sort of target.
And when I got to slip into the inventor's role in the campaign game, I did try to remain aloof and make rational business decisions. But the knowledge of what awaited my sailors kept rearing its ugly head and made me second-guess everything. (I am not a monster, despite convincing rumors to the contrary.)
Even as I'm typing this, I'm itching to go back and try to do better. Can I achieve the highest level of success on the Legacy table of outcomes?
"Beijing, 1986. Admiral Zhang Lianzhong, the old submariner and now deputy commander of the navy, approves his new office. On his desk sits a scale model of a famous 19th century artifact (your fishboat)."
Maybe one day.
PARTING SHOTS
When I first started learning the game, I ran into something that always irritates me in a rulebook: some die rolls would succeed on a result that's greater than or equal to a target number, while other rolls would succeed on a result that's less than a target number. Why not define success the same way in both instances? Either you make that target number of your don't. Way simpler to remember.
But then I realized the "greater than or equal to" criterion applied to my die rolls, while "less than" applied to the die rolls made by the various automated systems. In other words, I always want to see high rolls: they help me, or they hinder the game attempting to sabotage my efforts.
So it's all about the experience, about adopting those guys' point of view, putting yourself in their shoes. And hoping that, by some miracle, you escape that tin box alive.
(If you take a closer look at the game's cover, you'll notice that this particular fishboat has already detonated a charge and apparently survived the operation. Will it make it home, though?)
# # #
