Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island Review

Disclaimer

A collector’s edition of Robinson Crusoe: Adventures in the Cursed Island has been released since I got my copy of the game. While the game is mechanically identical, the collector’s edition comes with a few extras, like minis, and an introductory scenario to help you learn the game.

Except for component quality, everything covered in this review should apply to both editions.

Coursing The Island

At the start of each game, you must choose a scenario to play from the seven included in this box or, if you own either the Robinson Crusoe: Treasure Chest or Robinson Crusoe: Book of Adventures, from the many more included in those expansions.

A scenario provides a set of specific rules, including its winning and losing conditions, and the number of rounds in which you must complete it. If you do fail to do so before the time runs out or if any of the members of your crew die, then you lose the game.

During each round, awful things will occur. Trust me, it will be relentless to a point of desperation. In order to mitigate these effects and accomplish your goal, players take actions like hunting, exploring the island, gathering resources, building items, improving their camp and more.

One of my favourite aspects of Robinson Crusoe is how actions are performed. In most games, players choose an action on their turn and then resolve it. If an action changes the game state, then subsequent actions within the same round will benefit from the resolution of the previous action. For example, in many games, you can take an action to gain a resource and, within the same turn, perform another action using that resource.

Robinson Crusoe takes a different approach. It splits the process into two steps: planning and resolving actions. In the first step, players decide which actions to take by placing their pawns onto the action spaces within the board. Then, after all the pawns have been assigned, players resolve each action following a set order. Because action requirements are checked in the planning phase, you cannot use anything you have gained during the resolution phase until the next round.
For example, in order to build the fireplace item, you must build the fire first. If the fire is not available in the planning phase, then you must take a build action to build it. However, you cannot build the fireplace on the same round because the fire will not be available until the fire build action has been resolved in the resolving action step. Therefore, you must wait for an extra round before you can build the fireplace.

Those extra steps increase the difficulty of the game significantly because you have to worry, not only about getting the resources to fulfil an action, but to keep them until the next round. This changes how to tackle each situation because, as you get more experienced in the game, you will learn of many events that will take away your hard earned resources before you have the chance to use them.

Thematically, it blends perfectly with the premise of the game. Each round represents a set amount of time when actions happen at the same time. If a character plans to gather food, it will take some time before they find and collect it. Happening concurrently, someone is building a shelter. The action phase end signifies the completion of every character’s chosen actions, when characters return to camp, taking the results of their hard labour with them for everyone to use.

Also, don’t forget Robinson Crusoe is a cooperative game. When planning and taking actions, it is encouraged to discuss and work together what everyone is doing each round. Did I say encouraged? Scratch that, it is necessary to work together if you want to even get close to survive a couple of rounds, let alone winning a scenario.
Cursing The Island

On your first plays, you will get battered relentlessly and, in frustration, spew worlds like impossible and too random. But be honest, what is your resume when it comes to capsizing on an island and trying to survive while everything is set against you? If the answer is a lot, then sorry you had to go through that experience and congratulations on your survival. Either way, you probably will not survive the first few plays of Robinson Crusoe.

And yes, randomness is a factor, but the game provides the tools necessary to mitigate it. However, the most important one you must provide: experience.

The more you play, the more familiar you will become with the game’s systems, getting better at preparing for what lies ahead. Situations that on your first plays seemed impossible to deal with, become manageable. Frustration turns into satisfaction. And by the time you get your first win, you will be hooked… or not. I clearly was.

I wish I could illustrate how one’s thought process evolves the more you play. And I did, through 800 hundred words littered with sentences like ‘naturally growing decision tree’ or ‘Are you feeling overwhelmed yet? Good.’ After intense deliberation with myself, I omitted it and spare you having to read through that. Instead, those two sentences capture what I was trying to communicate.

At first, you might be overwhelmed by the slew of mechanics the game throws at you, so you might not consider all of them. A big part of this is not being familiar with what the cards have in store for you. As I have already established, nothing good.

As you keep exploring the island, you will start getting an idea of how actions can pan out, allowing you to develop alternative ways of handling certain situations. Going from being reactive to become proactive.

Ad Infinitum: Cruising The Island

Both modularity and replayability are important factors for me when deciding to purchase a game, but even more so when it is a cooperative non-campaign game.

Scenarios have a set of goals that do not change from play to play. Let’s assume we want to play a scenario multiple times. Then, what changes?

First and foremost, cards. They will provide the highest level of variability in any scenario, making it either more difficult or much more difficult.

The next source of variance is characters, but only if you are playing with less than four characters and do not own the Robinson Crusoe: Treasure Chest expansion. Each character has a set of abilities which will help you out in specific situations. For example, the cook has an ability that will allow you to get food, while the soldier focuses on improving weapons and hunting.

Last, inventions. At setup, you place the same nine default invention cards on the board, along with five random ones. These can be built throughout the game. Depending on which ones you draw, they might allow you to handle the scenario a bit more gracefully.

If you want even more variability, you can purchase the Robinson Crusoe: Treasure Chest. It boosts replayability by adding more of almost everything, even new optional mechanics.

Ad-Venturing The Island

Modularity equals scenario variety.

All scenarios share a lot of rules and mechanics, but their unique theme and rules make each one of them feel distinctive and fresh.

The base game comes with seven scenarios. Their themes vary wildly from ‘let’s build a pile of wood and light it on fire so that boat over there can pick us up to’ to ‘you are part of a film crew who wants to make a movie about a large ape who lives on an unexplored island.’

Seven is not a bad number. However, I would argue that ‘over fifty’ is a better number. That is what you get when you purchase the Robinson Crusoe: Book of Adventures expansion. Sadly, I cannot talk much about it because I missed the crowdfunding campaign for this expansion and, then, to add insult to injury, its retail release.

What I can tell you is that it bundles all scenarios from Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island and Robinson Crusoe: Treasure Chest and adds variations to most of them. It also comes with twenty completely new scenarios, even more if you supported their crowdfunding campaign.

(Insert here a lengthy and emphatic rambling about exclusive crowdfunding content)

I cannot attest to the quality of the new content, but I can guarantee you that, modularity-wise, is amazing value. I have spent uncountable hours playing the base scenarios, and even more hours playing the ones included on the Robinson Crusoe: Treasure Chest. Just going by numbers, having over forty new scenarios to experience, seems great.
Wrapping it Up

Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is one of my favourite cooperative games. Gameplay and theme come together in a unique experience that will not leave you indifferent and, at the beginning, if you hate failing, most likely frustrated. The game is about overcoming hardships and learning from them, almost like life itself. The major difference is that pretending to face difficulties is more fun than actually having to deal with them.