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Small Islands
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Description
This is the Lucky Duck Games version
Small Islands is a tile-placement game in which you are daring explorers discovering a magnificent archipelago. Its islands are brimming with natural resources but also temples from an ancient and mysterious civilization. Brave adventurers, bring back to your clan wealth & prestige!
A game is played in maximum 4 Rounds. At the beginning of each Round, each player secretly picks an Objective Card out of three cards. And in turn, players draw and place a Landscape Tile out of the 5 available (2 in hand, and 3 on the table). At a certain point, another option becomes available: placing a Ship Tile. When this tile is placed, in turn, all players place Houses on the islands and earn Prestige Points according to their Objective. Then players start a new Round. When the game ends, players receive additional points for their Ship Tiles.
In Advanced Mode, Objectives are split in 2 types of cards which allows you to create your own objectives amongst many combinations.
There is also a Solo Mode, innovative for its mechanics as well as for the very concept of a solo mode in a tile-placement game. We gave it an IA with a personality and different behaviors.
Small Islands offers you even more surprises, hidden at its heart.
Small Islands is a one to four player tile laying, territory building game with elements of push your luck. It is designed by Alexis Allard and published by MushrooM Games. A game of Small Islands will play a maximum of four rounds. At the beginning of each round all players, in secret, pick an objective card out of a selection of three. During a turn players will draw a tile from the three available and add it to their hand. Players will then place one of the tiles forming a communal landscape making sure the landscapes match.
The landscape tile removed is then replaced with a new one from the navigation stack. The Landscape tiles will have a variety of icons on them which are used to score points based on your objective cards.
Once the navigation stack is empty players can choose (but don’t have to) “land” one of their or the available ships, which score points at the end of the game. This ends the round and players earn points based on the objective card they selected. To score points players must place one of their limited houses on to an island that meets the objective’s mission. Points are awarded based on the objective. Once a house has been placed on an island that island and house do not score again in future rounds.
A new round begins with the exploration stacking being repopulated and new objective cards being dealt. Play continues this way until the end game is triggered. Points are totalled up and are gained from objective cards scored during the game and for each anchor that surrounds your coloured ship placed on the map.
An Island in the Sun
Small Islands has that similar feeling to Carcassonne of laying tiles to create a shared map. It scratches a similar itch. So does Small Islands offer anything different or is it re-skin of a popular classic.
I was very impressed with Small Islands. I purchased this on a recommendation from someone and I am so glad I did. I like that you get to choose which tile out of the available three you add to your hand. I also really like the aspect of laying one out of the three tiles in your hand. You are not at the total mercy of the tile draw and are able to do some short term planning. Small Islands gives you choices, good, tense choices. Another great feature is that you get to choose your objective out of a hand of three. They say good things come in threes and that is certainly true for Small Islands.
Picking up one out of three tiles, playing one out of three tiles and choosing one of out of three objectives.
The scoring is another very interesting aspect of the game. In the basic game you choose one objective card which has the mission and the reward. In the advanced game you get given separate mission cards and separate rewards and create your own objective card.
Players also get to choose when they score by placing one of the available ship tiles. This offers tension and interesting choices in the game. Do you push for a few more scoring points and hope that no one ruins your plans or score now but get less points. It is a wonderful balance that really sets Small Islands apart for me. Also, players only have a maximum of eight houses for the whole game, with the game lasting a maximum of four rounds. Careful selection of when and where to place your house is the crux of the game. It really sets the game apart from other tile laying games.
The artwork is gorgeous and at the end of the game the map of islands that has been created is lovely to look at.
One slight negative is that there is only 12 objective cards for the normal game mode. It would be nice to see a few more of these in the game. However, there are 12 mission cards and 12 rewards cards for the advanced mode so the combinations available are much higher when playing advanced. It feels like the normal mode is designed as an introduction to the game and the advanced mode is how it should be played.
Each player also has a bonus token that can placed on any tile during your turn. These are double sided and contain the icons that are present on the tiles. You can change the number of a particular symbol on an island tile to swing the scoring in your favour and eke out a few more points.
I have purposefully tried to avoid comparing this directly to Carcassonne. I currently have both in my collection but if Small Islands is supported and more content is realised Carcassonne might well get pushed out of the collection.
Small Islands is gorgeous looking, has simple rules and is quick. It is very accessible and definitely fits in to the gateway category.
If you’re familiar with the highly popular Carcassonne then you’re already halfway to knowing how to play Small Islands as Its extremely similar in style of gameplay as it consists of placing tiles to create land in a certain way to gain point. Small Islands, However, differs by having other features such as personal goals to complete, and of course the biggest difference, the player ships tiles.
Setup
The Setup for the game consists of choosing a colour and taking all of the corresponding pieces with the chosen colour. This is apart from the house components which you are only allowed a max of 4 at any one time so you will only take 4 of those for the time being. Then you create a shuffled deck of landscape tiles to pick from with 3 of these being randomly picked as the shop/reserve stack. You place the ship tiles alongside the shop area and have them faced up to be the colours of the players within the game (any that aren’t controlled by players will be turned to their grey side). The objective cards are then also shuffled, and each player takes 1 at random and keeps it private. Finally, the player takes 2 random landscape tiles from the pile of tiles to form their hand and the 4 starting tiles are placed in which ever way the players want to have them (as long as the orientation is valid for the game).
Gameplay
To play the standard game mode each player takes it in turns to do 1 of 2 actions. The first of those is: to take a landscape tile from the shop, then from their hand, place a tile onto the game area in a valid orientation and space connecting to the existing area. After the player has selected a token from the shop the shop is then refilled to the max of 3. During this action, the player currently playing is also able to place 1 of their extra resource tokens to the game area in an open spot.
The second action is: a player chooses to land their coloured ship/any grey ship available to end the current round. If a player lands their coloured ship then they gain as many points as there are port icons within the tiles surrounding the ship. This can only happen whilst placing the coloured ship and not with the grey ships. A round can also end prematurely if the stack of landscape tile runs out at any point and the shop cant be refilled. This makes it so you are then forced to land a ship if possible.
When a round of Small Islands is ended each player then has to choose where to place their houses out of the 4 they currently have (they may have less if they’ve used them a lot throughout the game). Each player is only allowed to have 1 house per island so choosing when and where to place a house can be the difference between winning and losing. A player can choose to place none if they so wish but this will mean they get no points for that round. Once each player has placed all their houses where they want, they flip their objective cards and go through each island you just placed a house on this round and tally up a score for each one of those houses/islands and take the point tokens corresponding to the points earned.
That is essentially the game loop of Small Islands and the overall goal for each player is to complete your personal goals each round whilst trying to get the most points as possible and also constantly being aware of the other players and what their hidden goal may be. At the end of the game the players count up their points and the player holding the most points wins the game. If there is a tie then the winner is, in order: the player with most houses placed, the player with the most ports around their ship, or finally, the last player to place a landscape or ship tile.
Solo Mode
The solo mode work very similarly to the multiplayer mode other than you play against an AI ship called Alexis who has their own types of moves for each round depending on their difficulty (this can be chosen before playing depending on how much of a challenge you want). The setup for this solo mode is also similar to the standard setup apart from the AI doesn’t get any objective, landscape cards, or bonus resource tokens.
Your turn stays the same as normal, and you follow the standard rules of gameplay as before. Alexis’ turn however is quite different as you draw a card from his deck you had to create for him and then perform the action specified by the card which will be either to explore or to land their ship. You will then discard the card and that is their turn complete.
When placing tiles for Alexis you have to stick to certain rules to make it fair. These rules are, you place his tile as close as the tile you placed on your last turn, you never place a tile connecting to an island that Alexis has already landed at, and you always try and place the tile in the preferred locations shown on the explore card drawn. When Alexis lands his ship he will take any of the grey ships available first and if these are depleted then he will take your ship if that is available. If at any point Alexis can not play his card as wanted then they swap to their other action type (explore card then gets played as a land card and vice versa).
The end of game rules in Small Islands are exactly the same as the multiplayer mode other than Alexis has his points added by the requirement/s shown on his player card.
Zatu Score
You might like
- Tile laying aspect
- Variable scoring
- Gorgeous art
Might not like
- Tile draw has some degree of randomness
- Opportunity for opponents to derail your plans
- Limited mission cards