SR Board Game Night - Hey! That's My Fish! / Forbidden Island; May 10 @ 6pm PST

[Merc]

Saturday May 10th @ 6pm PST / 9pm EST, join #SR-boardgames for chatting / info.


PROGRAM: ZUN TZU (setup.exe)
Reminder: Only works on Windows. Until people say they're interested in playing, but they can't use it, this program will continue to be used.


GAMES:
> Hey! That's My Fish! (BGG) (rules) (game box)
> Forbidden Island (BGG) (rules) (game box)

Both games are 2-4 players. The fish game is a competitive area enclosure game about greedy penguins. The island game on the other hand is a cooperative game involving managing actions to recover treasures before the island sinks.

Both games involve sinking/disappearing tiles.


TUTORIALS:

"Hey! That's My Fish!": ShowHide

There are sixty fish tiles: 30x tiles with 1 fish, 20x tiles with 2 fish, and 10x tiles with 3 fish. These are distributed on the board and then revealed, as shown, for example.

Then each player takes a turn placing a penguin on a tile with a single fish. Keep doing this until you've placed 2-4 (2 if a 4 player game, 3 if a 3 player game, 4 if a 2 player game).

After that, on your turn move a penguin in a straight line from one hex to another. You can go as long or as short as you want, as long as you don't make turns, go over another penguin, or go over an empty hex.

Once you leave a spot, you collect the tile where the penguin used to be, and it goes into your collection of fish.

If on your turn you can no longer move any of your penguins, collect the tiles your penguins are currently on, and you're out of the game. If you're in an isolated region where you're the only one that can reach tiles, you can still move (though you may wish to focus on moving the penguins still competing with other players obviously).

If a tile cannot be reached by a penguin, then it gets taken out of the game and no one scores it.

Once everyone is out, each player counts the number of fish they caught. Winner is the one with the most fish.

"Forbidden Island": ShowHide

Forbidden island involves an island of 24 area tiles, randomly distributed in the shape shown above. If the area is in good shape, it's colorful (as most of those are). If the area is sinking into the ocean beneath, then it becomes a blue toned image, and if it actually sinks, it's removed from the game.

We are playing a group of adventurers out to recover four pieces of elemental themed treasure (wind, water, earth, fire). Each adventurer has a different ability that we want to as a group take best advantage of to survive the sinking island.

Your turn, consists of 3 phases. In phase 1, you take any 3 actions, which are taken from the following:
1. Move from one tile to an adjacent tile (typically horizontal or vertical only).
2. Shore up (flip a blue-colored tile back to its normal position) a tile you're on or adjacent.
3. Give someone else a treasure card (they must be on the same tile).
4. Capture a treasure (by discarding four treasure cards of the type you're capturing).

Phase 2 involves drawing two treasure cards. The treasure deck is the orange deck, and consists of five treasure cards for each treasure, three waters rise cards, three helicopter lifts and two sandbags. Sandbags are free shore actions and helicopter lifts are free move actions (to anywhere on the island). Helicopter lifts are also required to leave the island and end the game. Note that there's a hand limit of five cards.

Waters rise cards are bad. When those come up, discarded cards from the flood deck are put back on top of that deck and the flood meter increases up a notch (meaning the island sinks faster).

Phase 3 involves drawing flood cards. The flood deck is the blue deck, and it's nothing but the island's area tiles. You draw a number of cards equal to the flood meter's level. If the tile is colored, flip it to the blue-toned side. If the tile is blue-toned, remove both the flood card and the area tile.

You lose if it becomes impossible to collect the four treasures, if a player drowns, or if fool's landing sinks (the helicopter can't land to rescue you). Players drown if a tile they are on sinks and they can't swim to an adjacent tile. (because they've also all sunk). You can also lose if the flood meter reaches the skull.

You win if all players make it to Fool's Landing with the four treasures between them and you then play a Helicopter Lift card to get the hell out of dodge.

[Anastasia]

Tutorials always help. Anyway, I'll probably be up for this one.

[Dracos]

I've only played the Near Impossible To Win variant of Forbidden Island, so I assume that we misread the rules :)  Looking forward to trying out a less "Well, there's only lose cards left in the draw pile" version hopefully.

[Merc]

Tutorial posted for first game. Forbidden Island tutorial is still pending.

[Merc]

Both tutorials are now up.

[Merc]

Reminder, game night is tomorrow night.

[Merc]

Forbidden Island murdered us all. Even on novice level.

[Dracos]

I enjoyed Forbidden island more than the penguin game, both for its co-opness and its themeing, but I just remain heavily unconvinced of it being balanced.  The responses on the web certainly seem to hint at folks either finding it super easy or super difficult.  Both playthroughs of mine haven't been tense, they've just been "We're winning, We're winning, and...well, now we're going to watch as the next few moves fail to close it and we die with a ton of the map still open."

Maybe that's the inherent strategy flaw, as we're taking way too long, but I think we were only on turn 4 even so.

[Merc]

I figure that there were three mistakes made that game, and all three involved shoring up spots that we should have abandoned to their likely fates. Unfortunately, it's fairly hard to make that judgement of when to shore up and when to abandon...

The game's not very forgiving with mistakes either, since as soon as you make a mistake and draw the Waters Rise card, you're usually at lady luck's mercy like we were on that last turn.

The game would be a bit more merciful if you drew flood cards before treasure cards, as at least then you'd have one turn of actions to try and salvage things when you make mistakes.

I also feel like the Diver's power is pretty weak compared to the other roles. He can be as good as the pilot...if you've let a lot of tiles sink. Which you don't typically don't want... So he's very situational. His power might have been better if we'd sacrificed some of the spots we focused on shoring up, but again, it was hard to tell when that was the right move until after the game was lost and looking back on it.