Retrospective: Bermuda Triangle

Recently, I came across a couple of “news” stories about the Bermuda Triangle, a topic I hadn’t thought about in years. Growing up in the 1970s, however, the Bermuda Triangle seemed to be everywhere. I vividly remember Charles Berlitz’s 1974 book on the subject – yes, that Charles Berlitz – as well as the steady stream of television documentaries solemnly recounting the mysterious disappearances of ships and airplanes. The 1970s really were a wild time, a period when the Unexplained was treated less as fringe nonsense than as a challenge to modern rationality. UFOs, ESP, ancient astronauts, haunted houses, and Atlantis all enjoyed a curious semi-respectability. The world, it seemed, was stranger than we had been led to believe and I, of course, ate it up.

Thinking about this cultural moment reminded me of a boardgame from the same period that I adored as a child, Bermuda Triangle. Published by Milton Bradley in 1975, it is not a particularly well-known game today, but I suspect that those of us who remember it at all do so largely because of a single plastic component central to its play, the Mystery Cloud. Ships caught beneath it might be removed from the board entirely, creating a physical absence that felt far more consequential to my friends and me than simply flipping a cardboard counter or sliding a token backward. Watching one’s ship laden with cargo and hard-won progress vanish into the Cloud’s plastic depths was a small but unforgettable drama.

Mechanically, Bermuda Triangle is a straightforward enough game. Two to four players each control a fleet of four merchant ships, attempting to move them from port to port to collect goods and return them safely to their home port. The first player to amass $350,000 in goods wins. Achieving this requires a mix of luck, timing, and a modest amount of tactical awareness. Ship movement is governed by dice rolls, with vessels advancing along established sea lanes. Crowding matters, because landing on an occupied space displaces the other ship, pushing it backward, and ports themselves can hold only four ships at a time. This creates opportunities for deliberate obstruction, allowing players to slow one another’s progress through careful positioning.

Beyond the roll of the dice, though, looms the game’s defining feature, the aforementioned Mystery Cloud. At the end of each turn, after each player has moved, a spinner determines the Cloud’s direction of movement across the board. Over time, it will inevitably drift into the sea lanes, crossing paths with the merchant vessels. Each ship token contains a small magnet, as does the Cloud itself. Depending on the Cloud’s orientation and direction of travel, it may “suck up” a ship it passes over, removing it from play entirely.

It is a simple mechanic, but a remarkably effective one. There is no certainty that a ship will be lost even when the Cloud passes directly overhead – the magnets were quite finicky, as I recall – and that unpredictability only heightened the tension. Would the ship survive or would it "vanish?" That moment of suspense, repeated again and again, gave the game a sense of menace wholly out of proportion to its rules complexity. I am convinced that this single feature carried the game for us, encouraging repeated play of what might otherwise have been dismissed as a fairly ordinary, even dull, roll-and-move affair.

Seen in retrospect, Bermuda Triangle feels like a perfect expression of its era. Its mechanics are serviceable, its strategy modest, but its theme and, crucially, its physical embodiment of that theme tapped directly into a cultural fascination with mystery and unseen forces. The game didn’t explain the Bermuda Triangle, but simply assumed its reality and invited us to suffer its consequences. In doing so, it captured something about those days as I remember them, namely, that the world was unstable, unpredictable, and perhaps unknowable. 

The game left a lasting impression on me in a way that Monopoly or Sorry! never did, since, on many levels, it's no better of a game design than either of those staples of childhood. The combination of the Mystery Cloud and its ostensible subject matter, though, was enough to elevate Bermuda Triangle in my imagination. Until I started thinking about this again, I hadn't realized how much I liked this game – or how much of a role it may have played in feeding the earliest embers of my lifelong fascination with the Unexplained. Not bad for an old boardgame!