The prevailing opinion among “serious” board game hobbyists is that mass-market games—the ones you grew up wanting out of the Sears Roebuck catalog or coveting around this time of the year as you performed gift reconnaissance in the board game and puzzle aisle of major retail stores…are crap.

A casual perusal of the current cardboard offerings on display where most games are sold reveal that mass-market games tend to fall into three categories: classic games whose rules have by now become a part of our inherited genetic codes, party games mostly derived from Victorian parlor games that frankly I’d rather have a conversation about syphilis than play, and licensed cash-in products focused more on displaying images or artwork from a current movie or TV program than providing anything approaching fun. Barring the odd entry like HEROSCAPE or even a standard deck of 52 cards from which any number of wonderful games can spring, the majority opinion in this case is mostly right, even if MONOPOLY doesn’t suck nearly as much as the armchair Internet elitists would have us believe.

But good mass-market games can and do happen from time to time, and 1982’s SURVIVE, published by Parker Brothers and widely available at the time to normal folks outside of the nerd retail circuit of hobby and comic shops is one such title. It’s one of those games that if you played it when you were a kid you would likely never forget it but revisiting it as an adult reveals that it’s just a great game that was well ahead of its time. If it were published today it would still stand head and shoulders above most of the European family games that have come to represent a large share of the gaming hobby.

It’s a simple game with easy rules as you’d expect from a Parker Brothers family game- this is definitely something you can get young kids interested in playing but the novelty and fun the mechanics in concert with the high level of player interaction will entertain all but the most jaded, sullen gamer more inclined to play games where things always go their way. The board is a tableau of open ocean in which sits a large island composed of hex tiles each with a landscape type (forest, rocks, and beach) and back printed with an event. The players have a handful of little plastic survivor guys that have a secret point value molded onto the bottom that all start on the island. The goal of the game is to get your guys off the island (which is slowly sinking, by the way) and on to one of the four outlying “safe” islands. Sometimes boats show up that can ferry three people together or a friendly dolphin may offer you a ride. Whoever gets the most point’s worth of survivors to safety wins the game.

Pretty easy, huh?

Well, you didn’t count on the sharks, whales, sea serpents, and vindictive players sitting to your right and left, did you? Each turn a player gets to remove an island tile, starting with the outermost ring of beach tiles. Anybody standing on that tile gets dumped into the drink. There’s a variety of events and even some weapons that the player can pick up and use to fend off hungry/angry sea beasts. Then, the player rolls a die with iconic pictures representing the hostile critters lying in wait to cause trouble. Whichever icon is rolled is the creature the player gets to commandeer to make your life miserable. The shark will eat every survivor in a hex (which can be very, very tragic), the whale can sink a boat (which means some nice whale-shark combinations are possible), and the sea serpent just eats everything. Then the player gets to use three movement points to get his folks off the island and toward stable ground. This goes on for 30-45 minutes until someone draws the volcano event which blows up the remainder of the island.

On paper, it doesn’t really sound like much but this is definitely the kind of game that benefits from playing with black hearted, traitorous scoundrels. There’s a really silly and fun diplomatic metagame that players who get into the spirit of things will enjoy and sometimes the sheer meanness of the game results in catastrophic fatalities. Personal vendettas in retaliation for sunken boats or devoured survivors are not uncommon and there’s even an in-game bargaining chip with the boats—they hold three survivors, but they don’t have to all be from the same player. I’ve captained a boat and sailed it straight toward imminent disaster just to sink two of another player’s survivors. And nothing beats removing a tile to drop a pile of survivors into shark-infested waters.

What really makes SURVIVE work is this element of intense player interaction; you’re constantly aware of what other players are doing, where they’re heading, and how you can position yourself to both get your people to safety and cause trouble while you’re at it. The result is that SURVIVE is a dramatic game with some pretty crazy runs of almost “take-that” style gameplay supported by a simple but tactically interesting movement game.