The Vesuvius Incident

I realize that most people haven't heard of The Vesuvius Incident. That's perfectly understandable, because the game was published by a small company (Fat Messiah Games) back in 1993, and went out of print in 1998 after relatively limited distribution. And the cover artwork wasn't great, and the name was unfortunate. So I'm here to tell you about this lost classic.

The Vesuvius Incident is part of a mini-genre of AmeriTrash games, one I like to call bughunt games, after a certain quote from the movie Aliens. Almost every single bughunt game was inspired by the first two movies in the Aliens series.

Just for reference, here are a few other examples of bughunt games:
Intruder
Space Hulk
The Awful Green Things from Outer Space (though made before Alien)

Like Arkham Horror, The Vesuvius Incident is a challenging solitaire game that also works well as a multi-player co-op. You control 12 space marines who are on a rescue mission after getting a distress call from a scientific vessel. Soon after boarding the ship, they realize that it has been overrun with dangerous Aliens. And there are some nice twists to the usual bughunt scenario. The science ship is in a decaying orbit, and the marines can't leave until they have either accounted for all 15 scientists as well as any marines who are MIA, at least not until the ship begins a fiery atmospheric re-entry.

Although the components don't compare favorably to those found in modern games, they were state-of-the-art compared to most genre games published before 1993. The paper map is very interesting, as it manages to offer a very clear 2-D representation of a 3-D ringship design. For those of you who aren't fans of hard science-fiction, a ringship is designed to provide simulated gravity in at least part of the ship via centrifugal force. The cardboard tokens are also good quality, using both sides in an efficient manner to represent all kinds of game information, though the aliens themselves are too garish and lousy-looking.

Aside from being that rare beast, a good co-op/solitaire game, The Vesuvius Incident remains noteworthy due to some very innovative aspects, one of which remain unique in gaming. Players will often be able to choose at the start of a turn whether they will operate in frantic combat mode or a more deliberate exploration mode. This is a great idea that is easy to grasp, though somewhat difficult to get used to in play. You know how action movies tend to skim over the non-action scenes and focus on the fights? In combat mode, characters are restricted to one action per turn and move according to strict movement allowance rules. In exploration mode, players can perform lots of actions, and can move freely within occupied areas.

This is a critical distinction, due to the decaying orbit problem. You only get so many exploration turns, and the last five boxes on the orbit track contain tokens marked "Orbit" on one side. On the other side, one is marked re-entry. So you want to be careful about when you use exploration turns. You theoretically get an infinite number of combat turns, but those are more dangerous, because you are checking more often for ambushes and even alien abduction. You heard me, alien abduction. A human who is alone has a 1 in 6 chance of being abducted at the end of each turn, and a successful abduction moves that character token to the encounter cup.

The encounter cup is vile and dangerous, as at least 50% of the encounter cup is Aliens. There are also some random events, like the lights going out or the security system malfunctioning. There are also some good things, like friendly survivors, robots and random useful items. And yes, abducted humans. If you find one of your marines in the encounter cup, he is either dead or severely injured... or as I like to call it, "probed." Sometimes you find body parts or security camera footage that accounts for one or more missing scientists.

Rather than messing with hit points, each marine has a simple life track, with spaces marked Healthy, Light Wound, Severe Wound, and Dead. The cardboard tracking counter shows jagged life sign blips on one side and flatlines on the other other, for when a marine is dead.

Oddly, all the marines are represented by miniature character sheets that are right on the map. This is very handy for solitaire play, but inconvenient for multi-player action. The really neat part is the square divided up into four smaller boxes to represent carrying capacity. Every marine starts with a rifle and a pistol that each take up a box, plus the medic gets a first aid kit. The first aid kit has a number on each edge, 1 thru 4, and you rotate that chit 90 degrees each time you use a point of first aid. Two of the marines have the option of ditching their rifles and taking Big Fucking Guns known as plasma rifles, and those weapons are represented by double-wide counters that take up two carrying capacity slots. I love that little touch, and the first aid kit token.

Why carry a pistol when you already have a rifle? Weapon jams are common. Anytime you roll a natural 2 on a d6, your weapon jams. The only exception is if a character panics under certain circumstances. Then your character panic-fires, for 3 quick shots at a steep -2 penalty, which then automatically jams the weapon. That makes panic a scary situation, you get one or two more rounds of shooting and then you are down to HTH against nasty aliens.

The aliens don't have health levels. They are either healthy, dead, or "down." Down status happens when you shoot them but do a questionable amount of damage. After that combat round, you roll to see if they bounce back up to continue the fight or stay down. Like all other bughunt games, these aliens don't have a ranged attack, they just get close and tear humans up in melee.

The Vesuvius Incident isn't perfect. The rule book is a little confusing with respect to what you can or can't do in an exploration turn or a combat turn. And the rules are often fiddly with detail. You check to see if there are encounters when you first enter a room, then do a different kind of check for encounters the turn after you first enter a room that hasn't been occupied recently, which also includes corridors that you left unguarded. There are fiddly modifiers regarding combat, surprise, panic, and hacking. And there is a two-sided sheet, about 25% of the size of the map, filled with charts, tables and lists of modifiers. You even have to check to see if the aliens attack, based on number of humans, number of aliens, and number of exits to the room.

Another problem is that the game is really, really challenging. In nearly half the games that I've played, we haven't even made it to the ring section of the ship, because we got wiped out too close to the shuttle dock. This can be discouraging to some gamers, though the difficulty can be adjusted by simply leaving some of the aliens out of the cup.

Once you climb the steep learning curves of this game, learning the rules, remembering all the modifiers and then finally getting the tactics down, The Vesuvius Incident is a pretty damn good game. The rules tend to give a cinematic level of drama to experienced gamers, fast-forwarding through the slow parts and delivering plenty of drama, especially during atmospheric re-entry, when you are stuck in combat mode and rolling for loss of the entire game after the first few turns of re-entry. And if you want an even greater challenge, there is an alternate scenario where you play out the prologue when the scientists are overrun by the aliens.

Because of the difficult rules, I didn't play Vesuvius for a long time, despite enjoying past games. Recently, I spent a few hours brushing up on the rules and playing a solitaire game. In the process, I re-created the mini characters sheets in Excel, plus made some extras for surviving scientists and the three robots, to make it easier for multi-player games. I also created two-sided reference sheets that fit in a standard clear card sleeve, just to summarize which actions can be done in combat or exploration turns. And just for laughs, I did one more two-sider with the pros and cons of exploration versus combat mode. On the other side, I made up a chain of command, with the idea that whoever controls the highest-ranked marine still in play would get to make the judgment call each turn on whether to use an exploration turn or not.

I always wanted to try this and its sister game (name eludes me) Both sound like a ton of fun.

Steve"try anything once"Avery

The Artifact.

Amazing you got through that review without mentioning The Artifact. My copy came with 4 copies of The Vesuvius Incident, and some extra sheets, and a GM rulebook.

The game is a quadruple-blind crazy multiplayer bughunt with varying goals, secret agendas, and tons of special powers. It throws away 2/3 of the former game's rules, and adds its own layers of insanity. It looks truly great. Problem is, the rules are scattered between 3 different sets of documents, and so trying to sort out how to play is daunting.

Enough that we've not yet tried it. Even though just by looking at it, I can tell it will be the game session of the year when we do.

I always forget that The Artifact even exists, because I was completely unaware of its existence until about two years ago. I was poking around at BGG, looking for useful content involving some of my old favorites and saw the link between Vesuvius and The Artifact. And since that was during my decade-long hiatus from playing Vesuvius, the awareness of The Artifact kind of dropped off my radar again.

Shellhead wrote:

I realize that most people haven't heard of The Vesuvius Incident. That's perfectly understandable, because the game was published by a small company (Fat Messiah Games) back in 1993, and went out of print in 1998 after relatively limited distribution. And the cover artwork wasn't great, and the name was unfortunate. So I'm here to tell you about this lost classic.

I'd heard of it. In fact, in one of the few decent gamer stories I'm able to tell, I bought my copy directly from the designer himself at a convention. I even exchanged a couple of letters with him later on.

I think this one was meant to have more support, but it just didn't pan out. The years mentioned in your post are also telling; I have a theory that some mid-90s games (or even entire companies) either survived or perished depending on how they reacted to "that whole internet thing." As crazy as it sounds now, not everyone knew just quite what to do with the internet back in the mid-90s.

Thanks for bringing these up, I'd never heard of them. The only other old-school bughunt game I knew about besides the ones you mentioned was Intruder. Vesuvius sounds pretty cool.

You know I was toying with the idea of recommending an article category entitled "Trash of Legend" or something similar, where write-ups such as this would be submitted.

This is front page material. It should be reprinted as an Article so that it gets better exposure, though I'd like you to hold off until I score a copy on ebay first.

S.

Sagrilarus wrote:

You know I was toying with the idea of recommending an article category entitled "Trash of Legend" or something similar, where write-ups such as this would be submitted.

I agree, total front page material. I love the idea of writeups of out-of-print games remembered fondly. Especially games from the 80s, which I think of as the first Golden Age of boardgames in the US.

This is front page quality stuff. Who cares how old the game is? This isn't a Cult Of The New website.

Jason Lutes wrote:

I agree, total front page material. I love the idea of writeups of out-of-print games remembered fondly. Especially games from the 80s, which I think of as the first Golden Age of boardgames in the US.

The 80's are fraught with peril, however.

For every The Great Kahn Game or Arabian Nights, there are a half dozen Thieves World, Fury of the Beastmen, or THINGS that only came in ziplock bags. (I've got a file cabinet full of ziplock bagged games. There are true horrors within. )

moofrank wrote:

...or THINGS that only came in ziplock bags. (I've got a file cabinet full of ziplock bagged games. There are true horrors within. )

Don't forget things that originally came in ziplock bags that were then stuffed into White Boxes with photocopied art pasted on by Lou Zocchi! (I finally had to purge my collection of Col. Lou boxes a few moves ago as I just couldn't take it any more. Hitler's War was the very last one to make it all the way to DC before going away.)

Zocchi/Gamescience catalogs were minefields.

Although my favorite pure minis game was a Zocchi design. Star Fleet Battle Manual was one of my favorite games when I was young. I still have the deluxe box set with most of the minis. Along with a spool of red thread in case someone wants to play the Tholians.

Vesuvius was available until recently from Sierra Madre games, but it seems it is really OOP now. The time limit concept of the decaying orbit reminds me a bit of Wreck of the BSM Pandora where you had to fix the ship before it shut down, although Vesuvius is more tactical...

I only played once, but I should get it out again

It seemed like gaming in the mid-90's was pretty much dominated by the CCG of the month. There was Magic, Spellfire, Vampire, Star Wars (although that one may have been later), a couple of military ones (the names elude me and I had a few sets but never played), etc. There were probably a few boardgames in this time but they couldn't hold up to the CCG juggernaut and video games.

Anyways, this particular game sounds interesting.

mikoyan wrote:

It seemed like gaming in the mid-90's was pretty much dominated by the CCG of the month. There was Magic, Spellfire, Vampire, Star Wars (although that one may have been later), a couple of military ones (the names elude me and I had a few sets but never played), etc. There were probably a few boardgames in this time but they couldn't hold up to the CCG juggernaut and video games.

There was an insane number of them... Shadowfist, Illuminati, Netrunner, BattleTech, Sim City, Mythos, Rage, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Super Deck...I think we've now covered about 5% of them.