Game Preview: Red November

By W. Eric Martin
June 14, 2008

Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Designers: Bruno Faidutti & Jef Gontier
Players: 3-8
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 60-120 minutes
Release Date: October 2008
Price: $24.95

Bruno Faidutti’s Citadels has been a mainstay of Fantasy Flight’s Silver Line for years. In fact, Faidutti has said that Citadels is his best-selling game ever, which isn’t a surprise considering all of the versions available around the world.

Now Faidutti, along with co-designer Jef Gontier, is launching a new Silver Line title, a cooperative game called Red November. “The idea for this game first came in a long discussion with Serge Laget and Bruno Cathala in the car when going to Essen, when they were still designing what would become Shadows over Camelot,” says Faidutti.

All Hands on, er, under Deck

“Cooperative gaming was still a new beast at this time, and we thought of other settings that could fit well with game systems similar to what they used in Shadows over Camelot. The wreck of the Kursk submarine” – in which 118 Russian sailors and officers died in August 2000 – “was still in our memories at this time, and I suggested a Russian submarine where everything is getting loose. Then the idea was set aside, and I unearthed it a few years later and started working on it with Jef.” (A prototype gameboard is shown at left.)

Jef Gontier, who has no design credits to date, is a gaming friend who lives near Faidutti. “He has playtested most of my recent designs,” says Faidutti. “The first reason I asked him to help me on this design was that his day job is in the development of French attack submarines. I don’t know more details since everything about his job seems to be top secret, but I’m sure it helped a lot in making this game extremely realistic.”

Realistic might be an odd word choice given that the published game depicts the players as gnomes rather than Russians, but it’s easy to understand why Fantasy Flight would make the switch. In Red November, each player moves their character around the sub, tracking it with a stackable time keeper of the same color. As the players move and time passes, more and more fires, floods and reactor failures occur, forcing the gnomes to find tools that can fix the problem or grog that they can down to build up liquid courage. Faidutti says that the game is best with four or more players.

“My problem with cooperative games,” says Faidutti, “is that I don’t really understand why I like them. My theoretical idea of a game is that it must be a fun moment of direct interaction and plain nastiness, and I really enjoy playing a game that fits this description. There’s a different challenge in cooperative games, and when the actual fashion for cooperative gaming started, I thought I wouldn’t like these new games. Well, I liked them - though the one I prefer is still Shadows over Camelot which, thanks to the traitor, is not really cooperative.”

Faidutti’s only previous game with cooperative elements is Terra, in which players try to solve world crises through card play, while being tempted to look out for themselves first since there can be only a single winner – or a table full of losers. ”Terra was a special beast, a game designed on order which I probably would not have made if I had not been asked to,” says Faidutti. “And, in fact, it’s not a cooperative game; it can even be very nasty and competitive when played with the right players - though it often ends badly.”

Gnome Place to Go but Down

”Red November is more a typical cooperative game, if such thing already exists, and bears some similarity in its game systems with Shadows over Camelot.” Faidutti adds, “It also had a ‘hidden traitor’ rule, sort of, though it’s optional, and we usually play with it.”

Faidutti confesses that laziness also plays a role in his previous lack of cooperative games. “All game designers will tell you that deduction games are really difficult to design and balance, and need much more time and work than any other kind of game,” he says. “I noticed this when working on Mystery of the Abbey. Since cooperative games seemed to be also something really special, and not self balancing like strategy games, I thought they also needed lots of work and were hard to design. I don’t know if we were lucky with Red November or if cooperative games are, in fact, easier to design, but the design process went much more smoothly than I thought it would – and cooperative games are very, very easy to playtest.”

As for a comparison with Matt Leacock’s Pandemic, the surprisingly successful cooperative game from Z-Man Games that has already blown through two print runs, Faidutti says, “I think Red November is more random, more immersive (sort of…) and more plain outward fun.” As if you’d expect anything else from Bruno…

Editor’s note: Bruno Faidutti has added a Red November page to his website, which includes thoughts on the variety of cooperative games available.

---

Comments:

You must register with BGN in order to comment. Registration is free, but if you appreciate the news, previews, reviews and other material posted on Boardgame News, please consider becoming a member to keep the info flowing to your screen!

This sort of scenario for a game seems to harken back to SPI’s “Wreck of the BSM Pandora”, which was a solitaire game with a outer space setting. Posted by Jonathan Degann on Jun 17, 2008 at 10:42 AM | #

Never heard of the BSM Pandora, but we considered a space station setting in case we could not find a publisher with the submarine. Happily, we foudn one. As for the general spirit of the game, it’s probably more akin with the Awful Green Things from Outer Space. Posted by Bruno Faidutti on Jun 24, 2008 at 12:10 AM | #

BSM Pandora was from “Ares” magazine game (SPI) and was pretty much a theme clone of the “Alien” movie. Posted by David Knepper on Jul 13, 2008 at 08:08 PM | #

< Back Home