The Fog Escape From Paradise

Intro

The sun casts its golden glow over the beaches as the salty ocean breeze sways the palm trees gently. The island is surrounded by crystal-clear seas as far as the eye can see. The thick and sticky jungle in the center of the island bursts with vibrant greenery, colorful exotic birds, and the sound of distant waterfalls. This is truly paradise.

Suddenly, out of breath messengers from the south of the island arrive with a message of doom. There is a thick brown fog, dark and oppressive, swirling and slithering across the island killing anything it touches. It has devastated all the villages on the island except the northmost one, the one protected by the mystic island guardians sworn to keep those villagers safe.

In The Fog Escape From Paradise, you play one of these island guardians, taking it upon yourself to help as many panicking villagers as possible to escape before the fog devours them whole. You start the game by drafting which villagers you’d like to keep safe from the fog and help escape into boats. Then you use a set number of movement points each turn to move them to safety before it’s too late.

Game Set Up

Initially you set the board up by connecting all the board parts together. Then you place all the islanders and enough obstacles on the hex grid on the beach. You then take turns drafting which islanders you will be responsible for helping to escape.

Different islanders have different abilities which make them more efficient at different types of movement, like jumping over obstacles or swapping places with another player’s islander so the initial draft isn’t just about choosing inhabitants closest to the boat you want to put them on, but also taking these abilities into account. Certain faces earn more points than others for getting them to the right position on their boat too, giving you further food for thought when drafting.

When drafting is complete, the second phase of the game begins.

Gameplay

Red islanders want to go to the red boat, green to the green boat and blue to the blue boat. Getting them there quickly earns you rescue points. But you also need to keep moving the islanders which are closest to the approaching fog to keep them safe in order to not lose points. So each turn, you have to walk a delicate balance between getting points for saving islanders while not losing points for getting them killed by the fog, all in the 30 seconds you have to take your turn*.

*The 30 second timers are optional but I would strongly recommend using them as without a time limit, the game turns into an analysis paralysis min-max nightmare as players try to work out which of the many different combos of moves will yield the best results in the long run. Turns taking many minutes take all of the fun out of the game in my opinion, and seem to go against the theme of islanders panicking trying to get to the boats as fast as possible. Your experience may vary of course, and if taking your time to tightly plan optimal strategy is your jam, the game can be played that way.

Your 7 movement points can be used in a wide variety of ways, from standard running into an adjacent empty space to squeezing through small gaps, to pushing several islanders forward one space and several more. The game comes with two useful little handouts for each player, one for tracking your movement points each turn, and one for explaining how many of your movement points each move costs. It takes a couple of rounds to get used to it but it’s pretty intuitive after that.

You get a couple of turns to start moving your islanders towards your ships before the fog starts to approach. Once it does, it kills any villager it touches, giving you negative points, the further from the boats, the greater the point loss value. In no particular order, these are some of the things that stand out for me about this game and make it different to other games out there.

Unique Atmosphere

I have genuinely never played a game so tense as The Fog Escape From Paradise. As the fog starts to roll in, and there are no gaps for your villagers to go to escape the fog, you find yourself panicking the way the fictional villagers must be. Every turn feels tense and chaotic and when you finally save ones from the back you thought were goners it’s some of the most satisfying gaming I’ve experienced.

Clever Double Turn Mechanic

Obviously in a game like this, whoever goes first will have the advantage, right? Well, not really is the answer. When all players have had their turns, the fog counter moves up one space (advancing the fog 0-2 hexes), then instead of starting with player one again, the next round starts with the player who just went, giving them a second turn.

So there is almost no advantage at all to going first and when you know that you have a double turn coming up, you can plan around that and pull off a 14 movement point turn in one go potentially massively changing your standing in the game.

Yeeting Rivals’ Islanders Into The Fog

One of the most satisfying moves you can perform with an islander is the swap, where your islander changes places with another player’s. If you act later than them in the round and you swap them into the path of the oncoming fog, they have no recourse against you and will be swallowed, losing them precious end game points. It’s a great feeling when you realise at the end of a game that you’ve only won by as many points as your opponent lost when you hurled their poor islander into the fog. By the same token, it can be horrifying when it happens to you and ruins all your plans.

Replayability

The Fog Escape From Paradise comes with a huge amount of replayability options, from customisable points for dead villagers, customisable rescue bonus points, and entire other set of boats on the reverse of the boat boards, an entirely blank beach for you to create your own beach outline with bushes, a decent and well thought through solo mode, 2 vs 2 team games and much more.

There are also rule modifiers for experienced players, my particular favourite is Rescue The Leaders where you have an additional challenging mission during the game to make sure your leader doesn’t die. You score extra points at the end depending on which boat your leader ends up on or lose points if she ended up dying to the fog.

The game is also easy to make up fun variants for. One we enjoyed playing is a house rule where a boat won’t leave without their leader of a matching colour, seated safely at the head of the boat. That means that there is an element of forced co-operation in order to help each other get the leaders through the pack, especially if you have a lot of villagers on that colour boat!

Final Thoughts

I’ve really loved every game of The Fog Escape From Paradise that I played. It was easy to learn and to teach, even to non-gamers and has some of the best table presence of any game I own. I think the artwork is really vibrant and quirky and for the amount of replayability, I think it’s up there with some of the best value for money I’ve received from a game.