Outdoor Survival- Quick Review After a Few Run-Throughs
I set up the Outdoor Survival and read through the rules and played out a few scenarios. At a first glance, it’s pretty much a random simulation of how to perish in the wilderness. There aren't a lot of strategy options, at least in the first few scenarios. It looks great, the map is amazing and the counters and cards are sharp, of course the main allure of this game is it’s connection to OD&D which makes it highly sought, but still reasonably findable on Ebay, I believe. The loss of movement due to lowered food/water levels coupled with a randomized movement mechanic makes it so that your chit very quickly finds itself in difficult terrain with no way out before dying of thirst. There is also a random encounter optional rule that makes resources sap even quicker statistically. I certainly would give it a few more go-throughs, and it’s definitely worth owning and showing to other OD&D heads, but without tweaking the rules there’s little chance of completing the scenarios, although I have yet to try scenarios 4 and 5. It was still fun, the turn sequence is super quick and the games play out (to almost always certain death) quickly. I did have one chit that got super lucky and never got turned around from random movement who was able to survive Scenario 2. I have also used this map to run a little OD&D and that was definitely fun and made picking this game up well worth it.
By Boldvay
