Red November is Faidutti's contribution for the current batch of co-op games being released recently. Players take the role of Russian gnomes trying to save a submarine where everything is going haywire.

How is the game play?

As in a purely traditional co-op game, all players play together to save the sub. Red November does not implement traitors as bigger games of the same genre do. Players move around the sub trying to solve most of the problems that keep popping up one after another. The success probability of the fix changes depending on the amount of time spent on trying to fix the problem. Every minute spent on an action increases the success rate by 10%. A 10-faced die is used for randomness.

The sub will be rescued in 60 minutes so players have to stay alive until then. A set of items can help increase the success rates of certain activities. They normally include things like fire-extinguishers, water pumps and the like. The most interesting item is grog, a vodka-like beverage that increases success rate for any activity and gives extra courage to players (allowing them to enter rooms in flames for instance). Grog has a great drawback: drinking it increases your grogginess level. This, in turn, might lead to a fainted gnome in the floor.

As time progresses, a series of problems arise. More time spent trying to solve something or simply sleeping due to hungover means more bad things happening.

Pros

It's a very compact game. Massive contents for such a small box.
Up to 8 players. Not many games out there can hold such a number.
Drinking grog, fainting and dieing with your body consumed by fierce flames can be relatively fun.
Can be a quick game with few players. The same is not true with too many players.
Timed problems are a great idea. They do add up to the tension.
Time-based track following the same principles of Thebes is a good addition.

Cons

A little too repetitive. Mainly in a setting with too many players. You may get tired of the problems very easily.
It's highly random. Having a huge amount of consecutive fires and/or floods can be way too much for any strategy.
Time-based modifiers can be confusing to some players and easily forgotten.
I noticed a very fun-killing tendency in two groups to simply use as many minutes as possible to solve anything. This removes the random factor of rolling the die but brings too many problems to the sub.
Player elimination is a reality in most games. It can be frustrating (an alternate "resurrection rule" is possible though).
Can be a lengthy game with many players.
The only "traitor" rule is when there are 10 minutes left to the rescue. Then players can try to escape leaving their fellow gnomes to their fate. This is a good idea but comes as a possibility only very late in the game.

Conclusion

It was not a very successful game with two different groups. They found it repetitive, boring, random and lengthy. The theme is great and compacted in an amazingly portable box. It is such a shame that it was not an immediate success after a couple of sessions.

The main reason for the player frustration may be the fact that solving some problems seem so little compared to the huge amount of problems that will be triggered at the same time. The games where we managed to survive were basically due to a very easy deck order combined with few intelligent actions.

Red November can be fun as a party game with a couple of players into the theme and not bothering the random factor plus eventual modifiers.