Tuesday 17 June 2014

Game Review - Forbidden Island

There are two types of gamers in the world, the ones who like playing games, and the ones who like playing games to beat everyone else...

I know many of both, but a warning in advance, todays game isn’t for those who want to beat everyone else...

Todays game needs everyone to work together.

From Matt Leacock (Creator of Pandemic, another excellent co-operative game) comes Forbidden Island, where the players take on the roles of various different adventurers and try to recover all the treasures from the island before it sinks.



Like many good games, it doesn’t take a long time to go through the rules, and then you’re into initial setup, which looks like this...



Players are handed one of the different adventurers at random



And then the island starts to sink...



The progression of the turn is simple, each player in turn takes up to three actions, draws two treasure deck cards, and then draws flood cards equal to the water level. Actions include moving to different tiles, shoring up a tile (flipping it from flooded to unflooded), give another players a treasure card if they’re on the same square, or capture a treasure by giving in four of the same treasure cards while on the tile corresponding to that treasure.

I can hear people out there right now thinking “That’s a lot like Pandemic...”

In some ways, yes it is, the core mechanic of making areas safe (From water or disease) and trading in treasure cards for one of four different treasures (or cures) is present, and the abilities of players are very similar to those in the main pandemic rules.



However...

There is a different dynamic to this game, with Pandemic, even drawing the same cards multiple times can be averted by quick teamwork and the use of the right characters, whereas with this, it’s possible to draw a location, get a flood, and then draw the location again which sinks it for good, no chance to recover it, no way to go back and prevent the loss, so the clock is very much more against everyone in this particular game, and that’s both a good and a bad thing.

Good because people get into this a lot faster, the game (once you’ve got used to it) can be played in hardly any time at all (sub twenty minutes for most of the advanced players) and it is different every time, with sometimes the treasures being near the helipad and sometimes not, rather than constantly being the same board every time.  This prevents you from going through the motions every time and the game becoming stale.

Bad for much the same reason.  This game can vary from really easy to really difficult from game to game, which is fine for experienced gamers, but could easily put off those just getting into games because a few bad draws on the decks and the game can’t be won, which can be particularly frustrating when none of the players have done anything wrong and you go from nearly win to crash and burn in the space of a single draw.

Still, for the most part, it’s an excellent game, the production values are very good, and the tin, while large, does not suffer from the Dragonology problem of “We will fill this box with empty space.”  Can be learned in ten minutes, played in anything from five minutes (we all drowned) to an hour (if you’re all being really careful), and presents a new challenge every time.


I may just pick up the sequel...