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...
