Review Details

Forbidden Island

Product Rating:

Product Review (submitted on September 21, 2010):

Matt Leacock, the designer of this game, is also the designer of Pandemic.

Forbidden Island is essentially Pandemic lite, or Pandemic for kids. Instead of travelling around the world, keeping diseases at bay while you stock up enough cards to develop a vaccine for each differently colored disease; you move around an island, resurfacing any sunken areas while you stock up enough cards to excavate a treasure.

You work co-operatively with your fellow players and each character (randomly assigned) has a different ability that can help. On your turn, you can move around the + shaped island and draw cards. After your turn, you flip over the cards in another deck to see which parts of the island has been flooded. Later on you can use your action points to resurface these sections.

Just like Pandemic had outbreak cards, there are flood cards in Forbidden City mixed in with the normal player cards. They have the same effect: shift the flood number up so that you turn over more flood cards per turn, flood a certain spot, and then shuffle all the flood cards that were previously discarded and put them on top of the deck so that you'll see them all over again. If a spot on the island is flooded again before resurfacing, you'll lose that spot permanently and may be stranded.

All the while, you are collecting player cards, hoping to match several together for a treasure. You will need to arrive on the correct place for the treasure, hopefully it hasn't sunk yet! Once all the treasures have been taken, all players must return to the helipad in order to leave the island and officially win.

Again, just like with Pandemic, you can increase the difficulty of the game, this time by setting the flood rate higher at the start of the game (instead of stuffing more outbreak cards into the player deck).

This is a great, cheap game to teach kids about planning and working together. It plays faster than Pandemic and is great for kids, but if you want something more to bite into, then you must go for Pandemic. The game suffers from the same problems as Pandemic, including faster players dictating game flow and putting others on the backburner, and eventual fall to repetition.

Still, it comes in a nice tin and great art. If you think Pandemic is too much to invest in, then this should be your fallback co-op game.