Game Review: Forbidden Island

It's been a few weeks into the updated version of Gaming with Rhuell and all I have been talking about is Age of Sigmar. But no more. Today, I wanted to start my board game review posts with a quick, fun, co-operative game called Forbidden Island by Gamewright.

The objective of Forbidden Island is for a team of adventurers (2 - 4 players) to gather four different treasure pieces and fly off in a helicopter before the island hiding all of the treasures sinks to the bottom of the ocean. But, before we get into game play, let's take a look at the components of the game to see how they stack up.

Components:
The first thing to notice is that Forbidden Island comes in a solid tin box a little smaller than a normal piece of paper instead of the standard cardboard box. The tin has some raised features that really bring out the beauty of the picture on the box design including raised trees, and words.

The stunning box cover art of Forbidden Island

Then, upon opening the box, one is presented with high quality components including a standard rulebook, double-sided cardboard tiles pieces with quality artwork screen printed with a gloss finish (that stand up to regular play), various high-gloss card decks made out of quality playing card material (that can be shuffled like regular cards), and simple plastic and wood figures and token pieces to represent the players and the sought after treasures.

The game's content in all its glory.

Nothing in the box feels cheap or like it won't survive multiple playthroughs except for the rulebook itself which is is printed on gloss paper. The cards themselves are especially durable for cards that are repeatedly shuffled and are easy to read and understand the limited game instructions presented on the cards. The stand-outs, however, are the playing tiles. These tiles are thick cardboard that have wonderful artistic images of various island areas printed on them and I often found myself looking at the artwork of any tiles that were no longer in play to see all the details hidden in the small 2" x 2" space. It is clear from the components of the game that the game was designed to survive through years of consistent play by children.

I would rank the game components as a solid 5 out of 5 in my completely arbitrary ranking system.

Game Play:
In brief, Forbidden Island is a co-operative game where each player takes his or her take separately, but acts in a manner that helps all of the players achieve the same objective: to capture all four treasures before the island sinks. Players work together to either "win" together or lose "together" though there are several more ways to lose the game than to win. Luckily, the basic rules for the game are short, straightforward, and easy to learn.

In Forbidden Island each player takes a turn activating their adventurer (of which there are six different adventurers; each with their own special ability to help them during the game) and performing up to three different actions.

The six possible different adventurers.

These actions include things like moving your piece one space, shoring up the island tile your piece is on (or an adjacent piece) to keep it from flooding, giving another player a treasure card from your hand, or capturing a treasure card.

At the start of the game, the board is set up in an island formation like this:

All set up and ready for play.

All of the island tile pieces are placed with six random tiles already flooded and turned face down to show the "blue" side by drawing the top six cards from the "Flood" card deck. The treasure pieces are set around the board waiting to be captured. Each adventurer being played is placed on the appropriate starting gate for that piece (which corresponds to the piece's color) and all the card decks are separated and shuffled.

Each adventurer starts with 2 treasurer cards which are placed face up in front of you so that everyone playing knows what treasurer cards are in play. The treasure cards are the cards that including pictures of the various treasures (5 copies of each treasure) as well as certain "special" cards that have various abilities like Helicopter, Sandbags, and Waters Rise!

After a player performs up to three actions, that player then draws two treasure cards - immediately discarding down to five cards of the players choice if that player has more than five cards. Any cards with a treasure icon can be used in subsequent turns to try and capture treasure while some of the special cards can be used immediately to help the players. Then that player flips over a number of Flood deck cards equal to the current water level as shown on the water table piece. If, during a player's turn, that player player draws a Waters Rise! card then more portions of the island become flooded and entire parts of the board can disappear (tiles disappear if the appropriate island tile card is flipped over from the Flood deck and the tile is already face-down in the game). Such portions of the island are no longer accessible to the adventurers and the island becomes smaller.

An example of the board after various island tiles have sunk. These island are no longer accessible and there abilities lost.

Once a player has four matching treasure cards (four cards with the same treasure icon) that player can capture that treasure by moving to one of the two island tiles that have that treasure icon on the tile and discard all four cards. That treasure is then captured and cannot be lost by the players.

All the requirements of a successful treasure capture! 

The adventurers "win" if they can successfully work together to capture all four treasurers AND have all adventurers move to the Fool's Landing game tile AND someone plays the Helicopter card so that everyone can leave the island together. The adventurers "lose" the game if both tiles for an uncaptured treasure sink, if the Fool's Landing tile sinks at any point in the game, if any player is on a game tile that sinks and there is not an adjacent game tile to swim to, or if the water level reaches the skull and crossbones on the water level board. Having played this game multiple times, I can say it is much easier to lose the game (especially when just starting out) than win the game, but such loses really drive a player to play again as the challenge of the game changes each and every time the game is played.

I would rank the ease of game play and the game rules themselves as a 4.5 out of 5 Flooded Treasures (the new random ranking system I have created solely for this game).

Overall Review:
Overall, Forbidden Island is a great game to play with people who don't appreciate more traditional strategy board games. The fact that the game is cooperative rather than competitive lends itself to being a good starter board game, family board game, or couples's date game.

The rules are easy to understand and grasp and are presented in a fairly straightforward manner so that someone with a beginners understanding of games and basic reading (an 8 to 10-year old) would be able to grasp the basic concepts of the game and could play it with very little help by a parent. The easy rules are make it a good starter game to ease new board game players into more advanced cooperative games like Pandemic where the the game is built on a similar structure with slightly more complicated rules.

The ability to play anywhere from 2 to 4 players which randomly choose one of six different adventurers each with a different ability provides huge replay value as each game is going to be different. I would say that having more players, especially newer players with less games under their belt, translates into a faster but more difficult game experience as events on the island begin to transpire more quickly (i.e. tiles sink much faster and a single misstep can cost you the game very easily). However, a two player game can be just as difficult if not more difficult if the adventurers that each player has do not have complimentary abilities for the way the game board has developed in that particular game.

I also like the fact that the game has a built in difficult system in the starting water level so that players can choose the type of challenge they are seeking. Based on the starting water level (which determines the number of Flood cards drawn each turn, as well as how many Waters Rise! cards are needed to move up to the next water level) the game's difficulty can change dramatically. Looking for an easy game, set the water level on the tracker to the Novice setting. Looking for a challenging game, set the water level to Legendary and start drawing three Flood cards right off the bat. The choice in how to play the game is up to you.

The infamous water level tracker complete with starting difficulty levels.

Forbidden Island also plays quickly (in set up, player turns, and total time) so that people with a short amount of time to play a game (say 30 minutes while a young child is napping) can fit a complete game in without having to stop.

However, not everything about Forbidden Island is on the same amazing level. For example, certain adventurer abilities are just better than others. If given the choice in a three or four player game than players would always choose the same adventurers because they have the best abilities to help win the game in any situation. It just seems that certain adventurer's abilities are only useful in certain game situations that don't always arise. Similarly, some abilities become useless half-way through the game so that the adventurer never uses their unique ability and just sticks to the regular actions. This is not necessarily bad, but it just shows that some adventurers are more useful or relevant in the game than others.

The other major criticism I have, and this is true of most cooperative games, is that Forbidden Island lends itself to one player dictating the actions for the other players so that each player is making the best use of their turn. If one player takes actions that aren't in line with what the other players are doing or want to do, then the game can quickly get out of hand and the players can lose. Thus, players must walk a fine line of figuring out how best to use their adventurer each turn on their own or someone at the table just ends up telling everyone what they should do and how to do it. I have seen this occur in Forbidden Island and similar cooperative games many times when one player's desire to win is greater than the other players who were just looking to play a game. At that point, the game just really dissolves into one player playing four adventurers.

Thus based on everything that Forbidden Island has to offer, I would rate Forbidden Island a 4.5 out of 5 Flooded Treasurers and would highly recommend this game to people with children who are looking for a good family game beyond those made by Milton Bradley and for those people whose significant others are not into more traditional strategy-based board games like Settlers of Catan. This is a great game to have in one's board game collection.