Bring An Inner Tube For This Adventure

While visiting a friend two weekends ago, we played a card game she'd gotten for Christmas called Forbidden Island. The goal is for the players, working cooperatively, to recover four treasures from an island before the island sinks.

The island is made up of tiles that you shuffle and then lay out in a particular pattern. So where locations are in relation to each other will change each time (The art on the tiles is nice. The locations make me think of Myst, a little*). For each artifact, there are two locations where it could be collected. Each player draws a card that determines what role they are. There are six, I think. There were only two of us; I pulled the Pilot, my friend got the Diver. Each player gets up to three actions, which can involve moving to adjacent tiles, sharing cards with your teammates, or shoring up flooded portions of the island.

Because at the end of each player's turn, after their actions and after they draw from the treasure card deck, they have to draw two cards from the Flood Deck, and those two tiles become flooded. You can still navigate through them, or collect treasures from them, but if their card is drawn again, before you shore that tile up, it sinks below the waves and is lost. If that was the last place you could collect the Chalice of Waters, well, you lose. If it was the last tile that connected you to a place you could collect a treasure from, you lose. Within the same deck as the treasure cards are Waters Rise! cards. These make you put all the locations you'd already drawn from the Flood Deck back on top of the pile (so you're certain to grab them soon), and makes you increase the water level one notch (which may increase the number of cards you have to draw from the Flood Deck).

So within your turn, you have to keep in mind what tiles you have to keep above water, and how likely they are to be in danger. And who has the best chance at grabbing a particular treasure (which requires having four cards from the treasure deck of that treasure). So you have to use your actions wisely. We ended up lucking out because the Diver can deal with flooded sections easily enough, and the Pilot is able to fly anywhere on the island he wants for an action, rather than move one adjacent tile at a time. And the game wants you to work together, and encourages other players to offer suggestions to whoever's turn it is on what would be best. I expected it was an every man for himself thing going in, so that was a pleasant surprise.

It's also a game that claims to be relatively quick that actually was. There are so many games that say it'll take an hour to play, but that first time through you have to keep checking the rules, trying to decipher the order of things, and it takes three times as long. This one is supposed to take less than an hour, and I think we ran pretty close to that.

I'd be curious to see how it goes with more players. It would give you more people to go for treasures, but it also means more tiles are getting flooded in each round, and the treasure cards probably ended up more dispersed, which makes it harder to get four of the same one to a single player.

* I mentioned that to my friend, then admitted I had only played the game once, at a different friend's house, and he got me trapped in a book on purpose.