Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Forbidden Island is great, and it's accessible enough that non-boardgame-players can pick it up and enjoy it
We played this last night for our boardgame evening game of choice, there were four of us which was perfect, and none of us had played it before so first job was a read-through of the rules which are elegantly simple but allow for plenty of debate and surprisingly deep tactics plus forward planning once you get into the game.
First game was on NORMAL skill level (we skipped novice), which we managed to beat without too much trouble. So after a break for food, PS4 VR and some chatter we had another go on the next to top skill level which I think was called ELITE, the one where you start with three flood cards.
Unfortunately the beers seemed to have clouded judgements somewhat (although I had no excuse as I was designated driver so was totally sober), and we definitely made at least two mistakes, plus we were playing gentlemanly rules so we didn't allow ourselves to 'rewind' and go back a turn to correct an error. (On one turn one of the moomins completely forgot to hand over a treasure card and instead did a shore up with one of his actions, which he wouldn't have got away with had I not been on a mission to the fridge to get more beers (and a fizzy orange for myself)).
It almost looked like we'd just about be able to make it with a combination of a our 'super powers' (the specific abilities each class gets) and clever use of helicopter and sandbag cards, but the flood level got away from us and we hit the skull and crossbones on the flood level marker.
Not entirely sure how much replayability it has overall, but a very enjoyable game and it was nice to play something collaborative rather than competitive.
Definitely something people can pick up quickly as well, you don't need to be some sort of boardgame pro to get the hang of the mechanics in pretty short order.