iPhone Forbidden Island

I know it's not cheap by app store standards, but if you like iOS board games, I really can't recommend this enough. It's a lot of fun, and I have no qualms at all about buying it.

 

Not backward necessarily. I can understand wanting the physical version. I enjoy this so much, I may get the physical version myself. I must admit though, that I may choose the app more often since you don't have to mess with the setup and breakdown.

 

Game Impressions

I finally grabbed it and have to agree it is a very polished tranlation of the physical board game.

I think it can best be summed up as Elder Sign/Ghost Stories light. Its a cooperative game with no AI, just you (one person playing all 2-4 characters or having different local players each take on a different character) vs. the environment. Can you claim all 4 treasures and fly off before the island sinks away? The game's 6 possible characters all have unique handy abilities which the players will be tasked with utilizing as efficiently as possible to reach their goal. Play consists of the characters running around shoring up (un-flooding) important island tiles so that all treasures can be claimed before pieces of the island drop off entirely (if a section that is already flooded is re-flooded, it disappears). To claim a treasure your character needs to present 4 cards matching that treasure while standing on one of that treasure's special tiles on the island. If a character dies (standing on a tile that sinks and unable to jump to an adjacent safe spot), all locations of an unclaimed treasure sink away, or your exit spot (the only space you can snag the helicopter off the island) sinks, the game is over.

Just like Elder Sign and Ghost Stories, you are free to determine how many characters you bring on the search but realize more is not always better. More bodies means it might be easier to shore up flooded sections, and there will be more useful specialties to call upon but it comes with the disadvantage of really dividing up those treasure cards (to claim a treasure one character must have 4 of the right type while on the right space) and actually causing more flooding (there is a flood phase during each charcter's turn).

The game has 4 difficulties (I think) and as far as I can tell this just determines the rate of flooding (Novice starts with a mild trickle whereas Legendary starts you in the midst of an island busting tsunami). Even if you choose Novice, the flooding will get worse and worse over time and, if not efficent in your treasure hunting, can get as bad as one would see in the Legendary difficulty.

My only whine is while it has a really comprehensive set of achievements that do chronicle a lot of interesting milestones like once you've won 5 Legendary games, I'd really like to see some sort of win/loss stats per difficulty level and number of character configurations (so about 12 different stats to track if my math is right).

4.5/5

 

Hmm. It is really well done but I think overall a lot simpler (not necessarily easier, just much more streamlined). According to folk on BGG, as this game was designed by the same guy behind Pandemic (never played but sounds like something in the Ghost Stories level of complexity), this was his attempt at a more family friendly pickup and play co-operative game.

The UI is slick, the character unique abilities interesting and straight forward, and I love the whole crumbling island aspect (you never know what will fall next...well actually in some cases you might by how the discard pile at points is simply turned over, unshuffled, and put back on the top of the Flood deck).

My one whine, besides no real highscore or win/loss tracking, is that I can see the Treasure Card management getting a bit tedious. After taking your character's 3 actions you draw 2 Treasure Cards. 90% of these Treasure Cards are just that, cards indicating 1 of the game's 4 treasures. You can only have 5 cards in your hand and need 4 matching ones to claim a treasure. What this means then is a big part of the game is bringing characters together into a single tile to swap cards until 1 or more have a complete set of one of the yet unclaimed treasures. I could see this Treasure Card swapping as something kind of fun if playing with real people around a table...but there is just something kind of silly about doing this when you control the two parties involved. While Ghost Stories and Elder Sign had some basic levels of teamwork, I don't recall either of them really requiring such frequent exchanges.

Like Ghost Stories, moving from one spot to another in as efficient manner as possible is crucial and with the island constantly crumbling, you'll never know what kind of path you'll need to take to get to some point on the other side of the island (this tactical aspect is mostly missing in Elder Sign as you could instantly move to any spot in a single turn).

So while there are maybe 3 special action cards you can draw from the Treasure Card pile, most of your actions are generic things any character can do (move, shore up a tile, claim a treasure, etc.) but based on your character you might be able to do a little differently (the Explorer is the only character that can move diagonally and the Engineer can shore up 2 tiles in a single action, etc.).

So if you'd like a slick streamlined/quicker playing take on cooperative play, here you go.

 

My family and I were on the lookout for new card or board games to play on our Sunday Game night. I saw the board version of this game at a price point a little higher than double the iOS version. However, after reading the rave reviews about the iOS port/conversion, I decided to buy it. My son and I are playing the table top format and enjoying it terribly. My only request would be to speed up the animation a bit, especially, the shuffling, etc. Looking forward to having my wife join to see how it plays with three people.

 

Good call! We played this over the Easter weekend and had a blast. Also, its cool to see another tech-geeky dad on this forum. I'm sure there are many others, I just haven't seen too many divulge this info.