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Snowblind is a press-your-luck and risk-management dice game in which 1-4 players take control of a polar expedition, racing to be the first to return from the South Pole.
The object of the game is to collect the most prestige points. The further you advance your flag, and the more men who survive the Antarctic winter at the end of the game, the more prestige your expedition receives. This requires careful management of crates, food and camps: without supplies, your explorers will not survive.
Play proceeds over a series of rounds. Within each round, players may make as many moves as they like, from those available, with each additional move becoming increasingly dangerous. In more detail, each turn, players may take an action (which involves taking a risk die from the action board, adding the die to their dice pool, then taking a corresponding action), or they choose to pass. Actions include moving explorers and crates, hunting for food, collecting research, and building camps. After completing an action, the active player rolls all the dice in their dice pool. High numbers result in exposure, the loss of supplies (crates and food), explorers being incapacitated, and even death. Exposure results can be offset by explorers remaining together (company) and the building of camps.
A round ends when all players have passed. At the end of the round, a weather card is drawn that may cause additional attrition, then the next round begins. When the pack ice card is drawn from the weather deck, one last round is played and the game ends.
- Favorite push-your-luck game
- Plays quickly
- Supports a small company
- Characters can starve or freeze to death
- Race to the South Pole and back
- Arctic/Antarctic exploration
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Dice Rolling — The core mechanic involves drawing dice for actions and then rolling all accumulated dice.
- Push Your Luck — Players must push their luck with dice rolls, where taking safer actions might involve rolling the worst dice.
- Race game — The objective is to be the first to reach the North/South Pole and return.
- Resource Management — Players manage supplies to survive the expedition.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- It is probably everything you would hate in a game.
- It's an area control game where you're trying to accomplish the various goals.
- The app the app's I think's really good.
- It's just really really clever.
- My favorite push your luck game.
- And inevitably, your guys will starve to death on the way or freeze to death.
- Man, I just love this game.
- It's a worker placement game, but you build out all these rooms in this castle or whatever and each one has different abilities that can happen there.
- Ponzi scheme. I'll I'll be really quick on this one.
- It's a bluffing bidding game in that sense.
- There's lots of those what I call laugh out loud moments where you just where you you call your dear friend some horrible name for the insulting offer that you accept because you have to
- It's a system um for basically doing it's almost like uh DMless Dungeons and Dragons, you know, in a in a board game.
- The entirety of the rule set for this game is one page long.
- It adds official cooperative rules.
- this is my favorite expansion.
- It is a true 100% sandbox in that regard.
- The win condition is voting because you're trying to become the new headmaster of the school or whatever.