It’s been out for a while, but I’m still playing tons of Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island. This may be my favorite board game ever.
It’s a brilliant little narrative engine. Leaving out all the dice rolls, you could describe all the little events that happened in your game and it’d come together like a self-contained Castaway story. I love games that tell stories. The less abstraction, the better.
People say it’s a monster, that it’s broken. These people have never stepped outside without socks on before. I read through the rules once and it all made perfect sense to me.
Each round, you flip over an event card. A fire sparks in the camp. Angry natives make off with your food. The card has a long term effect. You have two turns to address it. Maybe the natives are planning to come back and set your roof on fire. You can prevent it, if you want to.
Next comes the morale phase. Based on how everyone is feeling, you might get some determination tokens. These can be spent to use special player abilities, based on your role (cook, sailor, explorer, etc.).
Then, all the players must decide what they will be doing that day. You can explore. You can harvest resources. You can build up your shelter, or construct crude tools. You can go hunting, if you’ve found wild animal tracks. You can take a nap. Each player has two tokens to spend on these activities. This means you can dedicate yourself to one task, by putting both tokens on it, or half ass two tasks, by spending one. If you half ass it, you have to roll these dice. These determine whether you succeed, get injured, or have an adventure.
An adventure is like an event card. You draw it and something happens. Often you get to pick between two outcomes. One almost always involves shuffling the card into the event deck. If the card is drawn at the beginning of a round, then the second half of the card occurs. So, as an example. You have a “building” adventure. You spy some old-looking wood lying around. If you want, you can use it and add plus two to your camp’s defenses. But if you do, that card gets shuffled in. Later, when it comes back, that wood has crumbled apart, and a wild animal slips into the camp. Everyone takes a wound.
So, you have to weigh the short term benefit versus the potential long-term consequences.
Once everyone has taken their actions, then everyone needs to eat. You don’t have a refrigerator, so any non-perishable food that isn’t eaten rots overnight. Also, you roll dice for the weather. If you don’t have a strong roof or enough wood for a fire, then you take damage. Wild animals can attack at night, too, so you better have some walls built up.
Some people complain that the game is too hard. That the story it tells is one of endless tragedy. Well, Robinson Crusoe wasn’t a hero because the Dharma Initiative kept airlifting him food. He’s a hero because he told mother nature to go fuck itself and survived anyway. He also had a slave servant named Friday who helped him out. You can too, if you want to make the game easier. And a dog.
You don’t always have to play a game of pure survival (though that’s certainly always a factor). There are different scenarios with varied objectives. Like, you can play as a group of missionaries performing exorcisms around the “cursed” island. Or you can be the Swiss Family Robinson and build a home and fight off pirates. You can play a scenario where you are on Skull Island hunting for King Kong. Or join an expedition to track down Dr. Livingston. Or there’s an expansion pack that lets you play out a campaign, sailing along with Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle.
I love this game so much. I went out and bought every little expansion or add on or convention giveaway promo I could find. I even ordered these stickers straight from the developers to put the character’s faces on the little wooden chits. I replaced the resource cubes with painted wooden pieces that look like bananas, loaves of bread, animal skins, and wooden planks. The base game is getting a little hard to find, but a second edition that incorporates many of these add-ons I described is in the works.
Either way, you should hunt it down. It’s glorious.
