Components: Atlantis Rising is a mixed bag concerning components. The deluxe components are fantastic, especially the crystal ones. However they did not include enough meeples of each color to play when using different player counts, which seems rather cheap. Also the rules leave a lot to be desired and are ambiguous in a lot of situations.
Game Setup: Our setup took 15 minutes. Building the main board, selecting components available to build, setting the library deck and the misfortune deck and adjustments for player count took some time.
Mechanics: Worker placement, variable player powers, resource management, dice-rolling, cooperative.
Game Play: Place workers, suffer misfortune, take worker actions, repeat until win or lose.
Last Word: Atlantis Rising is one of those coop games where the alpha gamer will prevail. Its nothing more than collecting and spending the required resources to build structures that are determined at game setup. For us, nothing is more boring than table-talk about who is going to collect resource A and who is going to collect resource B, etc. Think cooperative Stone Age where you roll dice to collect resources, which is fun risk mitigation in a competitive setting but for a coop game its tedious. This game might have value as a solitaire game and its probably much more enjoyable as an game app for a single player, but as a full presentation board game I’d skip this one unless you have grade-school age kids where this kind of simple cooperative planning is a constructive way to burn an hour plus.
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