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Coral Islands is the 2-in-1 game featuring 2 competitive games utilising dice stacking as the prominent mechanic. Players are tasked with conservation efforts to repopulate coral as well as redevelop islands to make them conducive to animal life.
"Coral," designed by Richard Maass, sees players repopulate a shared coral reef using colourful translucent dice. Players take turns stacking dice on the board aiming to score points by completing structure cards that involve both their own dice and opponents' dice. In addition, players earn tokens representing the fish that live in the reef, which allow them to manipulate their dice or even place two dice on the same turn, generating engaging tactical and strategic tradeoffs between pursuing low-scoring easy-to-complete structure or high-scoring complex structures more likely to get blocked by an opponent, and also between earning points now or focusing on fish tokens to gain flexibility later. Sparking players to think in 3 dimensions, Coral creates a gameplay experience that feels fresh and unique. The player who earns the most points by completing structures before placing all 16 of their dice (12 in a 4-player game) is the winner!
"Islands," designed by Rohan Dargad, asks players to move around archipelago islands from sea-level heights to mountainous terrain in a concerted effort to reclaim lost land caused by rising sea levels. Players thus take the roles of conservation charities. The different coloured dice represent different geology of the islands. Each round 3 land cards are dealt which gives the active player the opportunity to move around an archipelago segment. These are overseen by conservation specialists which are asymmetric rule changes when a stack of cards is taken. Players then take and keep one of the cards from the stack to indicate their geological specialism - and move one of the dice on the archipelago a number of times based on the height of the stack of cards. Dice are continually moved around in this way , until the end of the game where players with the highest specialisms claim the most mountainous lands to score prestige points. The player with the highest prestige wins!
—description from the publisher
- Dice colors not helpful for colorblind players.
- Dice can get buried, making it hard to confirm patterns.
- Laborious to verify successful patterns.
- Competition from other similar games is stronger.
- Harmonies
- Cascadia
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Dice Placement — Players place and stack dice of their color to build formations based on objective cards.
- Set Collection — Players aim to build specific formations based on objective cards to score points.
- Spatial Awareness — The game involves placing and stacking dice, requiring spatial awareness to build formations.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- So, automatically I was starting off on a kind of a handicap really and it was very difficult for me to fight my way through those dice to try and build those patterns.
- But there is a nice degree of um of kind of logical reasoning and a deduction going on here.
- The game is is very enjoyable.
- It looks lovely. It's fast.
- This is pretty standard fair. There's a lot of games out there like this where you're just collecting your currency and then cashing them in to um against contracts to get you points.
- I loved how simple the turn system in this game is.
- This game kept it so clean and easy to understand, but kept the deduction part of the game really juicy.
- This is definitely one of the best ones that I've played.
- Be aware this game is barely a board game, although it is a game you play on a board.
- So think of it more of a storytelling game, more of a role-playing adjacent game than a traditional, you know, board game where you're making tons of decisions. More of a choose your own adventure if you want to put it that way.
- So, you know, the game is a mish mash of random encounters, but the stories you can tell over the course of the game are really enjoyable.
- So for me, this is almost like a time piece game that I'll keep for the rest of my life.