Fantasy Island…Treasure Island…Forbidden Island…what’s up with our obsession with islands?
I’ll leave you to ponder that. In the meantime, what’s up with Forbidden Island (the board game)?
WELL, Forbidden Island (the board game) is a cooperative game experience for 2-4 players. The elaborate backstory can be summed up as: “you’re on an island, now find the four treasures and get away before whole thing sinks.”
On to the gameplay, which is a little tricky to explain as (like most co-op games) Forbidden Island is quite intricate at first glance.
Before the game begins, the players set out the 20 location tiles that make up the titular[A1] island in a specified formation (a diamond-shaped grid), but at random, so that the various locations on the island are going to be in a different spot each game.
The next thing to do is to assign each player their particular Adventurer (at random). Each of the six Adventurers has its own special ability. The Engineer, for example, can shore up two sinking tiles per action instead of the usual one. The Explorer can move and shore up diagonally as well as orthogonally. And so on. Players will never (obviously) have all the Adventurers in a game at once, so they have to make the best of the selection that they do have. Which Adventurer you have also determines which tile you start on.
The next thing is to deal two Treasure Cards to each player. These are what you discard in order to claim a treasure when you’re on the appropriate tile.
Once the setup is finished it’s time to play!
The players take turns in Forbidden Island and they get up to three actions per turn. They can be any combination of:
- Move;
- Shore Up;
- Give a Treasure Card to another player, and
- Claim Treasure.
So why would you want to move? In order to find the treasures. The treasures are represented by four coloured plastic figurines, and each treasure is associated with two of the location tiles (it’s marked on the tiles).
Shoring up means flipping over an adjacent tile so that it’s no longer sinking (see below).
Claiming a treasure is done by discarding four matching Treasure Cards from your hand that depict the treasure located on the tile you’re on. Do this and you get the treasure figurine.
After a player takes his or her three actions, they then draw two cards from the Treasure deck (that’s good), and then a pre-determined number of cards from the Flood deck (that’s bad).
Drawing cards from the Flood deck is bad because it contains cards that correspond to the location tiles that make up the board. The first time you draw a Flood card for a certain location you pick up that tile and flip it over to its flooded side, and you then put the Flood card into a discard pile. Not too bad so far. When the Flood deck is exhausted however, you shuffle the discard pile and turn it over to form a new Flood deck. Now you can draw an already-flooded location again, and when you do, the location is removed from the board entirely. This drowns any player standing on it (!).
There’s only one way to win Forbidden Island, and it is: get all four Treasures, get to Fool’s Landing (which is a location tile), and play an Helilift card. On the other side of the coin, there are many ways to lose. Among others: if Fool’s Landing sinks, the game is over and the players lose. If both treasure tiles for one of the treasures you don’t have yet sink, the game is over and the players lose. If the tile a player is on sinks, and there is no adjacent tile (diagonally doesn’t count), then that player drowns, and all the players lose. And so on.
[A1]What does titular mean?
