Forbidden Island review

By Paco Garcia Jaen

There are times when one needs a quick, fun and easy game to spend a few minutes between chores, or while waiting for something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece, it doesn’t have to be amazing, it just have to be fun. Forbidden Island does that really well.

To give you an idea of how easy it is go get to understand it, we learned it and played it while we were waiting for a friend to read another game’s rules. Oh… and we played twice!

So what’s all about? Forbidden Island is a cooperative game, where the mission of the game is to rescue four different treasures before all the islands where they reside get flooded and disappear under the waters. You can take the role of a few characters, each one with different abilities to help undertake the task, and each round you can take actions like move or recover an island from flooding, and then draw cards for treasure and flooding.

To make things more difficult and tense, some cards will require you to shuffle and return to the main pile the locations that have been flooded already. They can also increase the number of locations that will get flooded every round, increasing the difficulty quite a bit!

Once all the treasures have been found, something similar to an orb, a chalice, a Sumerian winged lion and some sort of fire, players have to go back to the heliport island, if it hasn’t been flooded and then lost, of course.

The mechanics are a watered down version of Pandemics (no pun intended), they’re quick, easy, but they allow for enough strategy to make for fun times. Don’t get me wrong, you’re unlikely to want to play this game every day, or even more than a couple of times at a time, but as a time filler and family game, you simply can’t go wrong with it.

Very highly recommended!