Forbidden Island – a cooperative board game

Can you help rescue the four sacred treasures from the perils of Forbidden Island? The waters lap up and over the land, covering the gardens and gates, swamping the sites where the treasures lie hidden. Find all four treasures and get back to the helipad before Forbidden Island sinks beneath the waves! 

This is a modern boardgame, a co-operative game where all the players work together to win against the game. You only win if you rescue all four treasures, Fire, Ocean, Earth and Wind, and all get back to the helipad, and all fly off together. But every turn, more of the land floods and it gets harder and harder to complete the challenge. 

Co-op games have been around for decades. Boardgamegeek.com lists detective mystery games from the 1930s such as Murder Off Miami (1936) and Who Killed Roger Prentice? (1938). You use the clues in those games to deduce who the criminal really is. But the co-op genre got a huge boost with the 2008 game Pandemic, designed by Matt Leacock. As four terrible diseases spread around the world, special agents try to find the cures and delay the breakouts before it’s too late. Pandemic was a huge hit and spurred other modern game designers to make co-op games too.  

Matt Leacock re-worked Pandemic into the lighter, family-level game Forbidden Island. It uses the same card driven methods to have roughly the same places flood over and over, to have the game get harder as more cards get flipped, and each player has special abilities to give them an edge. If you’ve played Pandemic, you’ll recognise Forbidden Island right away. Matt followed it with Forbidden Desert and then Forbidden Sky to make a nice trilogy of adventures. 

The game works very well. As a co-op game, you talk about your moves each turn, but ultimately, you decide what you will do this turn. If you don’t like competition in games, one player beating everyone else, then a co-op game is a good idea. A co-op game encourages talking and listening skills, and helps players be mindful of what other people need. You have to plan ahead and share, and try to do what’s best for everyone.  

Either everybody wins, or everybody loses. If a player gets trapped or worse, falls into the waters and drowns, everybody loses. If the treasure sites are sunk before their trophy is collected, everybody loses. If you take too long and time runs out, everybody loses. If you cannot fly off the island in your helicopter, everybody loses. 

So you scramble around, trying to keep the floodwaters back, trying to meet up and swap cards, trying keep a safe path back to the helipad, and all the while the flood gets worse and worse! You can start the game at Novice level, and once you’ve had some success, up the stakes to Normal, Elite and then Legendary. 

We are building up a collection of modern boardgames and card games in the library, with a focus on good, quick Eurogames. Games you play with skill and thought, instead of rolling double sixes. Come to the Information Services Desk in Fountains and see what we’ve got. And please suggest games you’d like to see in the library. 

A review by Jon Power – Information Adviser