To survive, you’re going to need to complete your mission

Intrepid at its heart is a game of co-operation and negotiation. You’re astronauts onboard the ISS when a horrible accident befalls the station. To survive, you’re going to need to complete your mission (which comprises of 3 separate goals) and keep the production of your resources in the black, which you’ll do by rolling dice and assigning them to your individual systems onboard the ill-fated space station.

Each player has their own dial representing the resources that their station is producing, a set of coloured dice that match their station and individual tiles broken into 1 starter tier and 4 higher level tiers. The starter tiles are placed on the fold out board that looks fantastic and opens up just how you’d imagine a space station’s arms would unfurl.

All dials start the round in a negative value, you’ll roll your dice and assign them to your areas to increase the production of your station to ensure that A) your dial is on a positive number B) you can assign resources to one of the 3 missions to win the game and C) that it’s a high as possible so you’ll be able to spend any excess resources on upgrades for the next round.

Each player has a different game mechanic depending on which astronaut they’ve chosen, for instance the American’s tiles are all about adding and subtracting values from the dice you’ve rolled whereas the Canadian for instance is attempting to get even numbers as any odds they roll are unavailable so they’ll be using various systems to bring dice out of their storage.

After you’ve checked to see if you’ve been destroyed (lack of resources) you’ll look to see which was the lowest value number on a dial and you’ll have that many points to spend on upgrades (or bank them for a later turn). You can increase the amount of dice you roll, add new tiles to your section of the board or research to unlock higher tiers of tiles to place.

Whenever you add a system it will negatively impact a different system, so you’ll be able to do more with your food resources for instance but power now begins further in the red next round.

The negotiation element of this is superb, you’ll be having to work out if you can afford the power drain to get a new upgrade so will need to work with the other players, also you can lend some of your dice to other players during the game round so the interaction is really high.

The two disasters in the game are a meteorite shower and a toxic leak, which are both challenging in of themselves but come with variants you can add to change how they act.

The Good: Really thematic and easy to learn, fun to play and great components

The Bad: Minor quibble with the dials sometimes moving on their own accord.

In short, highly recommend this if you want a realistic space sim.