In Forbidden Island, you’re trying to grab the treasure and get off the sinking island.

Yep, I’m just getting around to playing it…

Dare to discover Forbidden Island! Join a team of fearless adventurers on a do-or-die mission to capture four sacred treasures from the ruins of this perilous paradise. Your team will have to work together and make some pulse-pounding maneuvers, as the island will sink beneath every step! Race to collect the treasures and make a triumphant escape before you are swallowed into the watery abyss!

Forbidden Island Game Play

Not going to spend too long on this or go into too much detail.

Players work together and take turns spending action points moving around a board, shoring up island tiles by flipping them face up. These tiles will have been flipped face down by random card draws to show those tiles are now underwater.

At the end of your turn, you draw cards that give you pieces of treasure and some other ability cards. You can also trade these cards with other players and a player can spend 4 identical treasure cards to discover one of these treasures.

When players have found all the treasures they need to get to the Helicopter to win.

But at the end of each player’s turn more and more tiles sink underwater. Occasionally, these cards are shuffled back on top of the deck and if a sunken tile would sink again, instead it’s removed from the board.

Also, each player has a special ability allowing them to do something no other player can.

Eventually, the players will win, or their exit will be inaccessible and they lose.

Theme

So, you’re risking your life for treasure and I never understand why people do this. I just feel we should just get out of there…

In Forbidden Desert, you need to find the pieces for your ride so you can leave the Desert that’s trying to kill you. That makes much more sense!

So while there is a theme, I’m not a fan.

Setup

Layout the tiles and set up the cards, I think that’s everything.

Components & Artwork

Everything is nice and good enough. The art on the tiles/cards is actually pretty nice when you look at it. The thing is, you don’t need to look at it.

The treasures are really nice components, overproduced if anything! I’d rather have had tokens for treasures and sculpted people for player pawns personally. Won’t complain though.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s a true family-friendly gateway game. It’s completely open information and co-op so you could even teach while playing if you would prefer to do that.

Of course, it was designed to be accessible.

Forbidden Island Summary

I already mentioned Forbidden Desert and there are a lot of co-op ‘race against time’ games like this in the Pandemic mould. I mean, they’re all made by the same person so it’s not surprising 🙂

Working together is fun and talking about actions and how each player can use their abilities to do what’s best for the group is a fun game to play together.

Assuming everyone is playing together and we’re not just looking at one player telling everyone what to do.

For this reason, I tend to stay away from owning opening information co-ops but I don’t mind playing them, with the right group.

This is a good one.

Jesta ThaRogue