Jaws Board Game Review

While you were distracted by the latest crowdfunding ballyhoo, the...

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Believe the hype, this is a SOLID title! Few are the game titles that have been able to successfully pull off two completely different game styles and mechanisms within the same game and yet keep it "The Downfall of Pompeii" immediately comes to mind. What an absolute joy to play.

People need to stop being surprised by Prospero Hall. Over the last couple years they've produced loads of solid games with almost alarming consistency. I can't name another designer with so few failures to their name offhand, much less a design team.

They do seem to be on something of a roll with Villainous, Jaws, and Horrified. I'm not familiar with the rest of their output, though.

I want to hate the fact that this game is based on such an old movie, but it sounds like a great game and that's what matters most.

There's got to be room somehow for a baby shark expansion.

You awful, awful man.

If they make a 5th player expansion it should be called The Bigger Boat

The structure of this Jaws game reminds me of an old TSR "pocket" game called Vampyre, which is also played in two acts.

During the first half of Vampyre, players move around a hex map depicting Transylvania. There random encounter charts based on terrain type, featuring attacks by wolves, bears, vampires, etc, and then there is a short stack of encounter chits at each town. Each time a player visits a town, they take the top chit from that town's stack and resolve it. The chits are usually items or coffins, with a few surprise attacks in the mix. You smash a coffin, and the first player to smash three coffins gets to choose an item that wasn't already found.

The second half of Vampyre is played on the flip side of the map, which depicts a slightly abstracted map of Castle Dracula. There are traps and monsters in every room, and you play until all players receive three bites or somebody manages to kill Dracula. There is a clock with tokens to mark the current hour and day/night. Each player advances the clock one hour at the start of his turn. At midnight, the traps re-set themselves and all the supernatural monsters re-spawn.