Escape from Atlantis, originally released in Europe under the title Survive! (also called Atlantis in Finland), is a board game first published in Dutch, French and German by Schmidt Spiele and in 1986 in English by Parker Brothers. A later version, with revised rules, was published in 1996 by Hasbro subsidiary Waddingtons. The game was designed by Julian Courtland-Smith.


Board
The centre of the game's board, representing the mountainous island of Atlantis itself, is covered with several tiers of molded hexagon tiles (37 in total) giving the game a partly three-dimensional appearance. The island is made up of four different "rings", with a mountain peak at the centre, a ring of mountains around it, a ring of forest around that, and finally a ring of sandy beach at the outer edge. Each of the tiles has space to hold a maximum of 3 Atlantian villagers.

The island is surrounded by open water, and in each of the four corners of the board are four coral islands.

As play progresses the land tiles are incrementally removed, simulating the ongoing sinking of the island. The objective of the game is for players to save their ten Atlantian villagers from the vanishing island by transporting them to the safety of the coral islands.


Other contents
Escape from Atlantis includes four Atlantian tribes, each with ten villagers. These are represented as small wooden figures, coloured red, blue, green and yellow. Each player picks one tribe.

Also included are boats and various sea animals: sharks, giant squid, sea serpents and dolphins.

Escape from Atlantis does not use a dice. Instead, a special spinner device is included.


Rules

Game start
At the start of the game, the island tiles are shuffled, and the island of Atlantis is built at the centre of the game board.

Each player sets his/her tribe up on the island, in places of his/her own choosing. The only limitation is that sandy beach only supports one villager per tile.

Some of the boats are placed in the sea adjacent to the island of Atlantis. In a two-player game, there are two boats. In a three- or four-player game, there are four.


Game rounds
On his/her turn, each player does three things, in this order:

Moves his/her villagers, 
Sinks one tile from the island of Atlantis, 
Spins the spinner and moves the sea animals accordingly. 

Movement phase
Movement is by the villagers walking on land, swimming (slowly) in the ocean, or being transported by boat or on the backs of helpful dolphins.

The player has a fixed number of three spaces of movement on each turn. This can be freely distributed among the villagers, for example by moving one villager three spaces, or moving three villagers one space each. When swimming, a villager may only move one space per turn, but there are no such restrictions for other methods of movement.

When travelling by boat, the player can also move a boat with villagers from other tribes on it, provided the player's own tribesmen hold a non-minority position (in other words, no other tribe has more members in the same boat). This creates a tactical element by allowing players to trasnport other players' villagers.


Sinking phase
On each turn, an island tile is removed from the island. The removal starts from the sandy beach on the outer edge, and continues further inland as outer rings are exhausted. A tile with villagers on it may only be sunk if no empty tiles are present in the currently sinking ring.

A villager falling into the water does not drown. He floats at the surface, capable of swimming one space per turn, or three when riding on the back of a dolphin. Dolphins can only transport one villager at a time.

The villagers' journeys are endangered variously by sea serpents, giant squid, sharks, and by whirlpools caused by the sinking land itself, and aided with dolphins and boats. A symbol on the bottom of the removed tile tells which of these appears in the tile's place.

Whirlpools destroy all moving objects (but not land) from the same space and adjacent spaces. The whirlpool is then discarded.


Spinning phase
In the spinning phase, the spinner shows which kind of sea animal should be moved, and how many blocks: one, two, three or dive.

The player then freely selects one of the animals in question from the board and moves it accordingly. He/she can decide its route for him/herself. This allows using sharks, giant squid or sea serpents to attack other players, or dolphins to come to the rescue of the player's own tribesmen.

When a sea animal comes to contact with villagers on the sea, what happens depends on the animal:

Sharks kill villagers swimming in the water. They do not harm boats or their passengers. 
Giant squid destroy boats. Any passengers in the boat survive, but are dropped in the water. 
Sea serpents both destroy boats and kill villagers. 
Dolphins allow villagers to ride them, giving them a maximum of three blocks of movement instead of one. They do not protect villagers from sharks or sea serpents. 
A diving sea animal can appear at any sea hexagon that does not have villagers or boats in it.


Winning the game
The game ends when all villagers either have safely arrived on the coral islands or are dead.

The winner is the player who, at the end of game, has succeeded in saving the most of their own villagers.


Variations
Other variations are assigning values ranging from 1 to 6 to the individual villagers, and having the island explode during gameplay.