You may not survive Hellapagos

If you were stranded on a desert island without Wilson or Tom Hanks to help you escape, do you think you could survive?

What if you were stranded with other castaways — do you think you’d make it?

Or perhaps the better question is, which of you will survive?

Well, it’s time to find out in Hellapagos!

You and your fellow castaways are shipwrecked on an island with an approaching hurricane in the distance. You must work together to have any hope of getting off the island before the hurricane strikes.

Or maybe at least some of you can make it off alive…

Will you be one of them?

That’s what you’re about to discover.

Hellapagos is a cooperative board game for up to 12 players that’s super challenging to all win together. But you have to try. Because if you don’t work together, no one will survive. By working together, there’s at least a chance you can make it.

Do you have what it takes to be one of the survivors?

 

How to play Hellapagos

The goal in Hellapagos is for players to escape the island before the hurricane hits. All players who manage to make it off the island win. The challenge is that some players may not survive that long.

Hellapagos may sound a bit like the reality TV show, Survivor, where contestants work together but someone gets booted out every episode. While there is voting in Hellapagos, there isn’t a guarantee of one player being knocked out each round. Everyone may make it through a round or multiple people may not. That all depends on a number of factors…

Game set up is very simple. Players set out the various decks of cards (Rafts, Castaway Status, Weather, and Wreckage), place the wooden balls in the canvas bag, place the wooden disc on the 0 space of the Raft track, set out the starting Food and Water markers on the track depending on the number of players, and deal everyone the right amount of Wreckage cards for their starting hand.

The game is played over a series of rounds. At the start of each round, the Staring Player card is passed to the person on the right. A new Weather card is also revealed to show the Precipitation side.

Beginning with the starting player and taking turns clockwise, each player takes 1 of 4 possible actions on their turn:

1. Catch Fish

The player draws a ball from the bag. The number of fish on the ball indicates how many fish they caught. The Food marker advances that many spaces on the survival track. The ball is returned to the bag.

2. Collect Water

The player looks at the number on the Precipitation (Weather) card for that round and advances the Water marker that many spaces on the survival track.

3. Gather Wood

To collect wood, players go to the snake-infested forest. The first bit of wood is easily found at the edge of the forest so the player advances the wooden disc 1 space along the Raft track. If they want more wood, the player announces how many more pieces of wood they want to collect. They draw that many balls from the bag all at once. If all are white, they move the disc that many spaces on the Raft track. If they draw the black ball, they are bitten by a snake and become sick for one round. They also don’t advance the marker any spaces beyond the initial 1 wood they found at the edge of the forest.

When Sick, the player takes a Castaway Status card. That player can not participate in votes at the end of the round and can’t perform an action or play cards in the next round. At the end of that next round, the player discards the status card before the “check for survival” stage (so they can vote in the next round).

As soon as the disc reaches the 6th space, add 1 Raft card to the space on the beach. Each raft built allows 1 survivor to escape the island.

4. Search Wreckage

The player takes the top Wreckage card from the deck and adds it to their hand. Wreckage cards can be played at any time during the game (unless they specify otherwise). After used, the card is discarded.

 

Eat, Drink, Hope to Survive

After everyone has taken their action, food and water are consumed. For each player alive in the game, there must be at least that much water and that much food.

First players check the water. If there are fewer water rations than players, the players can use Water cards now to add to the water rations. If that’s still not enough, a vote is held to determine who will die of thirst and are out of the game.

After that, the food level is checked. In a similar manner, surviving players may play Food cards to increase the rations. If there isn’t enough food to go around, a vote is held to determine who won’t get any food this round. Those unfortunate souls die of hunger and are also out of the game.

Survival all comes down to votes.

When a vote needs to be done, the starting player counts to 3 and everyone simultaneously points to another player. Whichever player has the most votes is eliminated. A player eliminated by a vote can play a card from their hand of the missing resource — in which case that player survives. They can’t be eliminated this round for lack of that resource.

If several players receive the most votes, the starting player decides which is eliminated.

If more than 1 player needs to be eliminated in a round, they’re done one at a time. After the first player is eliminated, another vote is taken among the surviving players.

Cards in hand of an eliminated player are distributed randomly alternating between the player to their left and right.

 

Game End

After the water and food are consumed, players check to see if the game ends. If there are at least as many Rafts built as there are survivors and there is at least 1 ration of water and food remaining for each survivor, they may board the rafts and escape the island. They win the game!

If that’s not the case yet, play continues onto a new round.

There’s also another way the game can end.

When the Hurricane Weather card is revealed, that means it’s the final round of the game. Rafts must leave the island at the end of the round or everyone dies.

If this is the case, after water and food are consumed, players must vote regarding who won’t be let onto the escaping rafts. Those who succeed in boarding the available rafts win the game!

 

Can the whole family enjoy Hellapagos?

As frequent readers of our reviews (and viewers of our video reviews) know, we love cooperative board games. We love the aspect of working together as a team to beat a game.

In all those games, players take positive actions to progress the game while the game itself takes negative actions to thwart our progress.

However, Hellapagos brings in a completely different twist to the cooperation. Because in Hellapagos, in order to survive, players will need to vote people to be eliminated!

In essence, players must take negative actions themselves to make it through the game.

So yes, it’s cooperative. But only until people start dying of thirst and hunger!

And there’s actually another aspect of the game I didn’t mention above in the rules. Among the wreckage of the ship, players will discover both gun and bullet cards. As you might imagine, these can be used in combination (if a player has both a gun and a bullet) to “shoot” another player to eliminate them from the game.

Thus, players can have a very direct role in eliminating others.

There are multiple guns and bullet cards in the thick deck, so it’s very likely these cards will come into play.

So on the whole, we can’t recommend Hellapagos as a family game.

If you’ve seen many of our reviews, you may note that we do have a number of games with guns and that depict players or characters dying. Some of those we still believe are fine to be considered family games. For us it comes down to how they are portrayed or used in the game. Some are much more direct than others. And in this case, these cards and voting actions are very direct and have an impact.

That being said, we’ve had a ton of fun playing Hellapagos at our monthly Guys Game Night.

We don’t have any trouble voting each other out of the game. Nor do we have trouble playing our gun and bullet cards to reduce the island population so more of us can get off the island.

The social aspect of this cooperative game means there isn’t an “alpha-gamer” problem at all. While players can encourage other players to take certain actions, the game doesn’t suffer from one player dictating what everyone must do to win.

That’s because there’s plenty of randomness.

Drawing balls from the bag while fishing or gathering wood is full randomness. But you take that chance.

Gathering water is a known amount because the Weather cards says how much will be gained. However, the order in which those cards come is completely random.

The Wreckage cards are a great help, but most of the games we’ve played we haven’t gained too many of them because we’re busy getting the other resources. So most of the cards in the deck go unused each game (unless you’re playing with 10+ players).

With all that randomness, you’ll come up short on resources and will have to result to votes. Which means voting (and surprise card plays) will have a big impact on the outcome.

Not everyone is up for that kind of game.

In summary, Hellapagos isn’t a game we’d recommend for playing with young children. And even though the recommended age on the box says 10+, we’d bump it up and say 13+. It’s more a teenager and above game in our opinion.

 

How does Hellapagos score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

Hellapagos is a game that absolutely must be played over and over!

A game of Hellapagos only last about 15 minutes. Since players only take 1 action on their turn, there isn’t any downtime in the game. Rounds sail by and some players survive. And regardless of the outcome, we want to dive right into the game again.

First of all because it’s challenging to make it off the island and we want to try again to do better. And second because we may want to get back and those who voted us off in the game before.

Hellapagos is definitely a game that has a meta-game element to it. That means what happens in one game will carry over into subsequent games. And it definitely comes through here.

So as soon as one game ends, we shuffle the Wreckage and Weather cards and go at it again.

Even though we don’t recommend it as a family game, Hellapagos is staying on our game shelves. It helps that our kids are now teens and above and that our adult friends have enjoyed playing it as well.

Now that you know more about the game, I’ll leave it up to you whether or not to grab a copy of Hellapagos for your game shelves.

We’d like to thank Gigamic for a review copy of Hellapagos.