The first actual game discussed under the new/old management here is to be Safe Return Doubtful, a 1996 production from the late, lamented Simulations Workshop. At one point or another I've owned all of Sim Workshop's games. I've sold most of them--I wasn't playing them, so out they went in the sell-off--but I kept this one, along with Ironman Football (which is supposedly being reprinted by somebody or other) and Rus, one of the more interesting (and rare) games in the Britannia family.
Simulations Workshop was one of the great Desktop Publishing (DTP) outfits. Their aesthetic tended heavily towards black-and-white, since that's the easiest thing to print off on cardstock on one's home printer, which is what I'm pretty sure happened. Some of their games--including Safe Return Doubtful--were also notable for having a lot of little cards to cut out. It led me to invest in a paper cutter, which has served me well lo these many years.
Safe Return Doubtful is a game, essentially a solitaire game although there's a very limited-interaction multiplayer system also available, on Arctic exploration, from about 1845 to Peary's expedition. You outfit your expedition, get on your ship, and see if you can make it to the pole and back without everybody dying. Your main job is to outfit your expedition. What equipment is available to you (in the form of cards) depends on when you're setting the game; early on, you can only pick food, tents, and sledges; as time moves on you can add dog teams, navigation equipment, spare parts, medicine, and so on--all of which prevent or mitigate the effects of various disasters and ill-tidings. All these other fun toys cost weight, though, so if you take a bunch of stuff along that means there's less room for food, which is the king of all equipment in this game.
Once you've outfitted your expedition, you have somewhat fewer choices to make. Your ship starts at 70 degrees latitude, and obviously you're trying to get to 90. You don't know what's ahead of you, and you find out by flipping over a cards from a huge "action" deck, which tells you what kind of weather you've encountered (and hence how far you move, either by ship, dogsled, or man-hauled sledge), if something horrible happens to you, and/or if you've encountered a new kind of terrain (which is determined by drawing from another deck). Every two turns, you have to eat, which will usually use up one of your food cards. If you're out of food cards, that's Bad. You can hunt when the weather is good, but otherwise you and your men may starve to death in the frozen wastes. In the winter, you can't move and you can't hunt; you just have to hope to survive.
The big decision to make when the expedition gets going is when to turn back. This is the part I always have trouble with. "Surely I'll be able to hunt successfully on the return journey," I say to myself as I push on for the pole with a dwindling amount of food remaining. "Nothing bad could possibly happen." Sometimes this actually works, in the sense that once I finally do chicken out I manage to at least get survivors back to the ship.
As I've kind of suggested, this isn't one of those games where you have a lot of choices. You make an expedition, decide how far you're going to go, and beyond that you're at the mercy of the action and terrain cards. This doesn't bother me so much. For one thing, the game takes about twenty minutes, and as a time-waster I have few intellectual demands on it. For another thing, it tells a pretty decent story, which is my real goal. There's a certain excitement, as it comes down to the wire: Can you return to 70 before everyone starves to death? (That's the usual question for my expeditions, rather than "Will he make the pole?")
I just flew through an early-period expedition: Just sledges and food. (I forewent tents. Tents are for pansies.) The crew were rated as good sledgers, which means they avoid falling into crevasses and get frostbite less often. (There are several crews available, each with a specialty.)
How far north you go depends largely on how lucky you get in the open ocean. The ice shelf begins anywhere between 73 and 83 latitude, somewhat randomly. (If your ship makes it to 83, it's automatically now ice shelf, and you have to disembark.) I got pretty lucky, and was deposited on land at 83 latitude, after a little over a year of shipborne travel. The journey was reasonably trouble-free; it was icebound for a while, found itself among icebergs but avoided major difficulties, and there was a scare of scurvy (that luckily didn't decimate the crew). Good weather overall.
Moving on foot through the arctic proved more problematic. We were stuck in deep snow and stopped by a wide river at one point, and in a year made it just 3 degrees. I turned us back with one food card remaining. That food ran out after just one more season, and we thus had to stop every other turn to hunt until we got back to the ship. If you hunt, you can't move. Still, the weather was mostly pretty good...but once back on the ship, the food there ran out (planning!) and now we had to stop the ship every other turn to hunt. The ship was also struck by almost an entire year's worth of bad weather, and the crew and its Intrepid Leader risked dying of starvation on more than one occasion. However, at the end of the summer of the fifth year of the expedition, the ships reached the fishing lanes once again, and sailed for home.
There's a lot of atmosphere in the game. Some of it, oddly, does not affect the game at all. You have to select an explorer, first of all, and you get a nice card with a black and white image of the great man. Which one you pick makes no difference at all; there are no special abilities or anything. Then you pick a ship. Each ship is rated for cargo capacity and nothing else, but they're all named, kind of pointlessly--from a purely ludic standpoint. But...who wants to just have a 22 cargo point ship when you can have the mighty Fram?
I like it. It gets decidedly mediocre ratings on the Geek, and I understand why. Again: Very few decisions. My standards for solo games are different than for multiplayer games, though; if I can get a good narrative out of it I declare victory, and SRD delivers a pretty good narrative, especially considering the time investment. I have meatier solo games--Peloponnesian War, [kind of aircraft] Leader, etc--but I have room for lighter fare.
I wish Sim Workshop would become a living entity again. Managing a DTP company used to be a harder thing to do; you really did need to print this stuff off on a laser printer and stuff them in ziploc bags and on and on. Now, though, you don't; Randy Moorehead (Sim Workshop's owner/etc) could put all this stuff on wargamedownloads.com and just wait for the money to roll in. I love all the little outfits that are putting out games on ungamed subjects, or with weird rules, or anything else that needs low overhead to really work. Putting the games together takes a little elbow grease, sure, but on the plus side you're paying very little money (speaking as someone who is willing to trade time for money, as I am paid very little). I will say that cutting out hundreds of cards for Safe Return Doubtful has paid off marvelously for me...even though, looking back over all the logs I've saved, I've never won...
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