Bob from Montpelier stopped by Quarterstaff Games last Tuesday for board game night. He brought something I’d seen at the Game ‘n Grill last weekend, but hadn’t gotten the chance to try: Forbidden Island. I’d heard about the game well before this past week, but I have to admit I mentally wrote it off without doing my due diligence. The initial descriptions I read made it sound like “Pandemic lite”: players work together to retrieve archaeological treasures from a rapidly sinking island. My first thought was a less complicated, more family-friendly version of Pandemic, which other comments around the web seemed to bear out.
As Bob explained the game, the similarities between Forbidden Island and Pandemic became even more obvious. Each player has a specific role in the expedition: explorer, diver, navigator and so on, just as everyone in Pandemic has a different job with the CDC. These roles have different abilities that aid the players as they move from location to location on the island, represented by a grid of tiles, and try to retrieve the artifacts.
See, the island is sinking. At the end of every turn, bad stuff happens. Cards are flipped over, revealing which locations, like the Temple of the Moon or Breakers Bridge, submerge this turn. If a submerged location is drawn again, it sinks beneath the waves completely. This not only makes traveling around the island increasingly difficult, but can cause everyone to lose the game if that location was the final resting place of a particular piece of treasure that hadn’t been recovered yet. Fortunately, sinking locations can be shored up. A player can spend an action to flip an adjacent tile, or the one on which their pawn stands, from submerged to dry. That location will begin to sink again, sooner or later, but it buys breathing room and keeps lines of movement around the island open. In fact, the rate at which the island sinks increases as well, not unlike, say, the infection rate of worldwide diseases increases over time. The number of location cards drawn increases as Waters Rise cards are pulled, so the number of tiles flipping each turn increases, until there are locations that the players just can’t save from sinking.
Held Action 