Don’t Let It Die is a 1 to 4 player cooperative survival game where the players are a team of neanderthals that have found a fire, courtesy of a lightening strike. The goal is to keep the fire alive, survive, and research as a group to uncover the secrets of fire within 14 days.
The game is designed by Dustin Hendrickson, with art by Samuel Milham, and published by Thunk Board Games.
After selecting a team of four characters (no matter the player count), players spend stamina points to Investigate Fire – rolling a die to determine how many fire knowledge points are earned, craft weapons and tools, use skills, or draw a gather, forage, harvest, or hunt cards.
The goal of the game is to survive, keep the fire alive, and discover the “Fire Starter” technology before 14 days elapse. Players can loose the game by the fire going out, all characters being incapacitated, or not discovering fire before 14 days are up.
Gameplay is fairly straight forward, but the different combinations of characters and their abilities to successfully achieve your goals.
The tutorial is written by Nekonyancer and is well done, as I have found most of their tutorials to be. It gives the rules and helps to convey the strategies for playing the game. The tutorial ran smoothly.
I am not particularly a huge fan of cooperative games where the goal is just to meet specific achievements. Give me a cooperative story game all day long. But this an your standard Pandemic ‘style’ of games just don’t keep me engaged in the same way as other games.
And while I know that a ton of people enjoy the pixelated style of art, it’s just not for me.
So overall, this was a bust in regards to games for me, but not a bad game. It just depends on your preferred play style.
I’m rating this one at a 3/10 on Board Game Geek, for me. Your mileage may very!
Leave a Reply