The 7th Continent

Posted on by Paul Beakley

The 7th Continent

Took more than an hour to unwrap nearly 2000 cards (core plus three supplements), and my table looked like I’d opened a case of cigarettes. Unexpected house guest Patrick Riegert​​​​ helped my play through about five actions, just to get a feel for what the game is about.

It’s…interesting. Hard to say what actual play is like, because it’s just five actions. It feels super rpg-y, which is neat. The actions are all pretty small, and there are a million of them even though they seem to all work the same way: pull cards from a central Action Deck, which is your party’s overall health, hoping to draw enough successes to best whatever you’re doing. Then put one of the cards you drew into your hand for later.

Your choice of actions is limited to the map bit you’re standing on, events you need to resolve, cards in your own hand, and equipment you’ve comes across or built. We found a conch shell, which, whatever. But then shortly after I found the score to a Viking dirge and, hey I just happen to have a music making device. Weird, seems interesting and pointless but it’s a huge, huge sandbox so I’ll bet it’s a life saving move at some point.

The basic you win/lose pivot is whether you can overcome one or more curses placed on the survivors of an ill fated exploration of the Seventh Continent. You choose how many curses are weighing on you, which seems like a weird dial. There are also hard/easy modes you can choose before play.

One of the most interesting things about this game to me is that not only can you save your game, you should save it every couple hours. Because there are resets that only take place on a save. Reminds me of camp phase in Darkest Dungeon or Torchbearer.

Allegedly there are 1000 hours of play in the box. A thousand! That’s 10x the amount of play I poured into High Frontier and that is a number I cannot imagine. How audacious. a thousand minutes! Like 17 hours.

Published by Paul Beakley

I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

29 thoughts on “The 7th Continent”

  2. Correction: the play time is supposedly a thousand minutes, not hours. Nonetheless, 1000 minutes is an understatement – i’m about 25 hours in and still have many more to go. Most people on bgg are reporting 20-30 hours for their first play. One guy binged-played through all of the curses and posted his opinions of each.

  5. A thousand minutes seems way more achievable. What is that, like 17ish hours? I assume that’s for one curse.

    With all the expansions unwrapped, the amount of content is staggering.

  17. Paolo Greco resets: when you save/load, all cards except the one you’re standing on and those which have been permanently “banished” are removed from the board and put back in the box. This means that you have to draw out those cards again as you explore those areas. This can have side effects in several cases, namely hunting/fishing areas and spaces with “hidden numbers”. When you find a space with a hidden number (and you notice the number), you replace that card with the card number matching the hidden number. When you save/load, that gets reset, so you have to spot the numbers again (if you want to – most aren’t critical, but at least a couple of them are).

  19. When you save, all characters are forced onto a single terrain card. That one is removed from the board, but it is saved for later. None of the others are. That one single Terrain card goes into the Save stack, not back to its normal place in the box.

  23. Yeah, the camp-phase reset is something I’m going to need to experience on my own. I read that and didn’t really understand how you’re able to continue the game from a single terrain tile, but I guess you do and I guess that means lots of stuff gets made available again via new exploration tiles.

  25. The save is genius, and much faster than you’d expect.

    Grab (1) your current map card (and only that one), (2) your journal and all its cards, (3) all characters with all their stuff stacked with them (use the die cards to record how much wear your items have remaining), (4) then the action deck and discards (with separator cards).

    Banished stuff goes behind the banished divider, and everything else gets sorted back into the box.

    More precisely, the rest of the map is discarded to “the past”, including fog cards, and everything in the past is sorted back into the box.

    When reloading, take (1) your map card and put it on the table, then (2) your journal and stuff and (3) your characters and split ’em up, putting their figures on the map card, and (4) the action deck and discards, putting them back.

    I keep the “past” divider on the table to hold those special discards (non-action deck cards are not placed in the normal discard pile), and the “banished” divider for banished stuff.

  29. I think I didn’t understand that the map is stable, that it’s just randomized events standing in the way of replicating the map from any given start tile. Hmm! Neat sleight of hand.

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