The Spill is live (Save the animals from the Spill)

Update: The Spill has launched on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 17 days. You may pledge for the standard or the Deluxe edition of the game.

Our preview post below was published on September 2.

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The Spill is a 1-4 players game of threat containment and action point management. An offshore rig has blown out and oil is now spilling over the ocean and towards the coast, threatening marine life. It’s up to your team of four specialists to salvage what you can out of this ecological catastrophe. The Kickstarter campaign will launch on September 7.

Image source: BGG

The game is played on a board showing a circular grid with 24 sectors divided into three levels (from the closest to the circle center to the closest to the ridge). Oil will spill over from a dice tower (the broken offshore rig) at the center, in the form of black dice. You drop the dice in the tower and they stay in the quadrant in which they fell, with their value indicating which sector of the quadrant they are to be placed in. They will fill the sector from the sector furthest to the ridge to the closest one.

At the beginning of the game, you pick up four specialists to form your team. You then drop 8 dice in the dice tower to start the spillover. Each of your specialists is represented by a ship that will navigate the circumference of the grid, each starting on a separate quadrant. You also place Marine Animal tokens on specific parts of the grid for each of the six species. They all start healthy but might get contaminated if the oil spills in the specific grid cell they are living in. Furthermore, if oil spills over an already contaminated animal, that animal goes to the sick bay.

Image source: BGG

In each round, you play as one specialist, going through them in succession from one round to another. First, during the Spill phase, you drop dice in the dice tower. Some dice are black, representing oil that spills over from the rig, some are blue, triggering weather effects depending on their value. You can adjust the difficulty of the game by opting from one of the three different “tracks” that specify how many oil dice are dropped in the dice tower each round (a number that increases throughout the game as sectors get entirely filled with oil). Then, the Action phase starts: your specialist can use 4 action points to move, rescue animals in their current sector (a contaminated animal costs double to be rescued), return oil dice from their current sector to the bag, or remove them entirely from the game (which costs triple). Finally, a Specialist can earn Resource cards that may grant extra action points.

You lose the game if one of these three conditions is fulfilled: three contaminated animals of a given species go to the sickbay, one contaminated animal of each of the six species goes to the sickbay, or six sectors are entirely filled with oil. You win by removing 12 oil dice from the game, and saving two full sets of Marine Animals and 3 contaminated animals.

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