Alone Under The Ice is the first in what promises to be a series of mystery adventure games. Like Lost in Adventure (DV Games) which we featured recently on Board's Eye View, Back Stories is card driven - and the box contains a hefty deck of large cards! - but the novelty in this game from La Boite de Jeu and Lucky Duck is that the cards with which you interact offer a choice of responses and you select which interactions you want to make through the use of overlay cards. The idea is that you lay the overlay card against the back of the card with which you are interacting (hence the game's Back Stories title) so that you can only read the text that's revealed in the overlay's cutout section. It's a clever take on the 'choose your own adventure' genre and it works remarkably well.
Back Stories: Alone Under The Ice is designed by Jules Messaud and Anthony Perone, with art by Cyrille Bertin. You play as Sophie, a character who is searching for her lost brother. Given the Alone in the title, it's appropriate that Back Stories is playable solo but, as with other mystery and escape-room-in-a-box games, playing cooperatively with other players lets you bounce ideas and suggestions off each other and makes the game an enjoyable shared voyage of discovery. The box suggests a 1-6 player count. It's certainly doable with six player - indeed you could just as easily take it higher - but the sweet spot is probably just two or three players: enough to encourage discussion and debate but not so many that players end up as passive passengers or ensuring that everyone is involved means the game's hour or so's playing time gets overly stretched.
As always, we're keen to avoid giving away any spoilers so our Board's Eye View 360 shows only the location and interaction cards you'll see on set up. What follows next depends on the interactions you take. You'll obviously expect to move on to different locations with many more options to explore, and the overlay cards with notches at the top will generally reference other numbered cards. Just be warned that the choices you make may negatively affect the status of your character, which again will impact on the emerging story...
We've enjoyed playing Back Stories: Alone Under The Ice and we're eagerly looking forward to the next game in the series, due out this year and, like this one, distributed in the UK by Hachette BoardGames. The game incorporates alternative endings, so degrees of success or failure, so you might want to return to the game to see how a different set of decisions might resolve as a different conclusion, but this isn't a game that's primarily designed to be replayed. That said, unlike, for example, Kosmos' Exit games, you're not damaging or destroying any components so this is a game you can readily repackage by putting the cards all back in numerical order and then pass on to others to play through once you're finished with it.