The Spill Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review The Spill, a cooperative board game published by Smirk and Dagger. In The Spill, players are trying to save marine animals and clean up the ocean after an oil platform spilled.

Tabletop gaming has no shortage of “save the world” type of cooperative games. From every flavor of pandemic, to games like Flashpoint: Fire Rescue, gamers have been using action points to be heroes for decades. Today we are going to be looking at the newest offering in this genre from publisher Smirk and Dagger Games. You’ll be able to embrace your inner Captain Planet as The Spill tasks you and up to three other players with cleaning up an oil spill in the Ocean.

The Spill, designed by Andy Kim, plays in about 50 minutes and works well at any player count.

The first thing you’ll do in The Spill is choose your response team. Every game needs at least four characters, so you’ll need to double up if you have less than 4 players. Each character has a unique special power from requiring fewer actions to clean up oil dice to ignoring weather effects to needing fewer actions to save animals. Players will also need to choose a win condition card, there are 9 in total among three levels of difficulty.

On a player’s turn, they first drop a number of dice into the oil tower. Dice will then be placed in the quadrant where they land, on a sector matching its number. If a die lands on an animal, that animal is flipped to its sickly side. If it’s not rescued by the end of that player’s turn, it heads to sickbay. If a sector ever gets its third dice, a spillout occurs and the tracker moves up a level (possibly increasing the dice dropped each turn).

Then the player gets four action points to use. Options include moving your boat up to two sectors,