Who doesn't love a good board game? Sitting down with a group of your close peers and collectively enrapturing yourselves in a friendly competition of deduction/ chance, it must be one of the purest ways to enjoy an evening with your friends. But, of course, evenings out with your friends are no longer a thing anymore, so what exactly can these board games do to stay relevant with the times? Well, the obvious choice would be to slap their digital selves up on Boardgame simulator for Steam, but I suppose that doesn't really pay the bills now does it, so I can only assume that's the driving force behind 'The Captain is Dead's digital version on Steam. (And I swear that I typed up that brief before I watched the trailer and saw that they literally used the same excuse for this product's existence that I suggested. Great minds, huh?)
So The Captain is Dead essentially sets itself in a very Star Trek-looking environment in which events are transpiring in a manner that you usually see on such shows. The ship is under attack by aliens, many of the basic ship functions have been destroyed and things look dire. Except things slightly differ in that, much as the title implies, the Captain was actually killed in this crossfire, meaning that it's now up to the crew to stave of alien boarding parties whilst fixing the ship and essentially getting the heck out of dodge. This does make The Captain is Dead one of those rare cooperative boardgames wherein the real enemy is falling apart as a team. (Oh, and the aliens that want to eat your carcasses. Them too.) So at least you can see why this is the sort of game that made sense being put under the control of an AI in this digital reimagining.
Right away something that appeals to me in a pure mechanical sense is way in which the team have managed to bring the original game to life. Personally I've seen a lot of boardgames and just plain party games bought to the digital realm, but more often then not they just turn out to be literal simulations of playing the game in real life over an actual reimaging of what this game would be like as a packaged game. I suppose one good example of an imagining done in this style would be 'Town of Salem', which is a Steam creation that evolves upon the popular social deduction party game 'Werewolf' and brings a lot more complexity to it than you could reasonably be expected to spring upon a group of your friends at a party. It also manages to sneak some great features that I'm sure wouldn't fly in the real life, like a 'last will and testament' which is almost universally used to tell really dumb jokes in the last second. That's the sort of pedigree I see The Captain is Dead trailing.
The art style on the box has been transferred over to a full 3D rendering that actually hides it's boardgame roots rather well. There's plenty of slick animations and quippy retorts from the cartoony crewmates and a general liveliness to the art that seems almost reminiscent of the sort of energy you'd see on a Saturday morning cartoon. (Oh, I suppose that's not really a relevant reference anymore. Just any morning nowadays.) I'm surprised and quite encouraged by how well all of this translates over, as it does make me think about the way in which Party games are making something of a resurgence in the public eye. Now of course, games like this are a tad more in-depth than the casual titles that are always destined to have more mass appeal, but that still proves there's space in the world for all walks of games.
In fact, this game really make me think about the apparent death of physical media which current affairs seems to have hastened. I mean, books turning into digital books will never take off with me; but music absconding from disc sales completely, Movies turning to streaming services and even entire game's consoles being sold without disc drives; (Which makes more and more sense to be given the hell my disc drive is subjecting me to lately) all seem logical. Doesn't it seem like a natural step, then, for board games to go digital? Sure, in some ways it defies the social aspect that games like these, especially cooperative ones, are designed to feed upon, but in such an age adaptation and evolution is necessary.
The Captain is Dead just happens to fit into a lucky space wherein all of the 'antagonist actions' are controlled by cards and random chance so there's nothing really lost in removing the human element there. All players really input to the challenge is in deciding how difficult the warp drive is to fix (I.e. how many turns it'll take), and that's a ready-made menu setting if ever I've seen one. Not every boardgame out there could make the transition so naturally, however, and I wonder how they may end up faring in today's world. With social interaction becoming an increasingly rare commodity this would make the perfect age for them, but maybe their time will come as a sort of renaissance once all this is over. (I only hope so, there's something of an immutable 'underdog appeal' to boardgame companies)
When I look at the sorts of institutions that exist to advertise the gaming industry, The Future Gaming Show is the one which I feel more and more is becoming representative of the majority. I mean of course there's a space for the triple A system sellers that are destined success stories from the moment they are conceived from some board-room somewhere, but when I see game like these that's when I really start to recognise the sorts of games that I'll be seeing people playing on their everyday. I certainly think it's telling how much multiplayer games have been overshadowed in the mainstream despite their rising popularity by the actual gaming populace.
So yes, perhaps I'm seeing The Captain is Dead less as an individual game on it's own and more as an indication to where I think the industry should be trending. With Among Us and Fall Guys still the kings of roost in gaming right now, I feel I'm hardly being controversial in claiming that. Maybe This isn't a title destined for those sorts of heights, but I wouldn't put the odd 15 minutes of fame entirely out of the running given the way the world is trending. Who honestly can say? Of course I'm speaking about the public consciousness when I say that, for personally the only online game I play is Pokemon Sword like an actual addict.
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