Hellapagos is survival-themed ‘co-opetition’ board game, where players work together through gathering critical resources and building escape rafts to escape the island before the hurricane hits, or when food and water runs out, at which points players have to clamber for survival.
My project group and I played Hellapagos together in a project meeting session. We all played the game as first-time beginners and it was really, really fun. We played co-operatively the first round, and decided to be (slightly) more adversarial in the second round, with more bluffing and omission of information for self-benefit. I loved the game so much I decided to get the game to play
with my friends and family later.
A huge shoutout to Christina for getting and lending the game to us! Thanks so much 🥹
Fellowship:
Through the mechanics of having common pooled resources among all the players on the island –
specifically food rations, water supplies and plank wood for escape rafts to escape the island – and having each player taking turns performing actions such as foraging for food, water or plank wood, the 
dynamic of players depending on one another for survival is created. The dynamic is further enhanced by the fact that the winning condition is extremely difficult to achieve alone. Players’ survival depends on having sufficient food, water and having a raft to carry players off the island, and it is impossible for one player to be able to achieve all three since there is only one action per turn per player.
Hence, the game creates a strong sense of fellowship, as players are forced to depend on each other on survival and each player is expected to perform actions to contribute to the common good.
Challenge:
Through the mechanics of rapidly reducing the commonly pooled resources per round, the dynamic of players having to figure out how to ensure there are enough resources for them to survive the round is created. The narrative that there is a hurricane approaching from the seventh round onwards that may force the players to have to leave the island with however many existing rafts that they have already built (therefore forcing players to fight for the rafts) contributes to a sense of impending doom, and creates the dynamics of urgency and the fun of challenge.
The fun of challenge is also created from other mechanics: for example, there is randomness and uncertainty of multiple actions. Players get a variable number of food (1-3 units) with each food foraging action, and players may get bitten by a snake when foraging for planks. This create a sense of excitement and uncertainty. The fact that players are under no conditions allowed to show their hand of cards make it hard to each player to actually know what each other owns in their hands. This contributes to the dynamic of uncertainty between players, as each player cannot be sure what each other holds in their hands. Dynamics like bluffing can emerge from this too. Additionally, this gives the fun of fellowship an interesting twist, contributing to the fun of challenge.
Narrative:
The premise of the game along with the board’s design of an island contributes to the narrative of the players as a group of survivors who are washed up on Hellapagos, a desert island. The graphic design decisions of the deserted island and the stormy sea evoke a sense of isolation and desperation, contributing to the fun of narrative.
Each round, there is a corresponding ‘weather’ card which determines the amount of water that the player can collect, and make players feel like they are living through a actual desert survival episode.
Differentiation from competitors
Hellapagos differentiates itself from other games in its genre by placing a much stronger emphasis on cooperative gameplay. I personally love its cooperative nature with forced competition at the end. Players must work together to gather resources and make strategic decisions about how to allocate them but are forced to eliminate one another towards the end of the game by the design of the mechanics. This allows for many different individual and team strategies to play the game. This differentiates the game from other games in its genre as most survival multiplayer games focus solely on competition, and rarely is the element of cooperation emphasized as strongly as in Hellapagos.
Improving the game
There are several ways I would suggest to tweak the mechanics of the game make the game better. Firstly, to increase the fun of narrative, I suggest adding additional events cards that impact all players. Currently, the only event card is the hurricane weather card, which creates a terminating condition for the game, forcing the game to end. Having more random event cards increases the replay factor of the game. For example, there could be additional hazards such as flooding or accidental poisoning of all players, or positive events such as discovery of a huge stash of food left behind by previous survivors.
Also, currently, it is much harder for smaller groups to succeed in the game. This is partially due to the greatly reduced likelihood of one of the players gathering rare ‘special ability’ cards that let players be able to double the resources that they can collect. Therefore there is a disproportionately greater scale of challenge of playing as a small group may reduce the degree of fun. This can be improved by adjusting the mechanics of the game, by increasing the number of special powers cards for game rounds with lower number of players, to help the game become more playable.
