Friday 25 August 2023

Unfathomable

Father Dagon leads a wave to assault the Atlantica.

I painted the Deep Ones from Unfathomable, a boardgame where you are crew on a 1920s steamship being attacked by Lovecraftian watery monsters. You have to work together to allocate finite resources, resolve dilemmas, and repel boarders- but at least one of the players is secretly helping the monsters and trying to keep their real allegiance hidden!

Fairly simple paintjobs with Contrast and gloss varnish and plain black bases. There are twenty Deep Ones and they're identical, so it wasn't fun painting them and they've been stalled in my painting queue for over a year. Father Dagon and Mother Hydra are pleasantly hefty chunks of plastic.

Deep Ones

Father Dagon spawns more Deep Ones

Mother Hydra smashes the ship

The boardgame is a retheme of the 2008 classic Battlestar Galactica, which is well out of print. In BSG you are humans evading the Cylons, but some players may be secretly Cylons. The two games are very mechanically similar. The retheme acknowledges the heavy debt to BSG and other SF:

  • You're on the SS Atlantica
  • One of the crew has a dog called Starbuck
  • There was a ship's cat called Ripley
  • The Engineer is Jeanne Lafarge
  • etc.

I was a traitor in our recent game- it was challenging trying to teach and supervise the game, because mistakes and oversights would favour me!