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Washed ashore on a forgotten island with your fellow castaways, you must try to scrape together enough food to survive while avoiding illness, wild boars and deadly tsunami. Hopefully you can keep your secret love alive and help your secret hate find their proper fate.
Desert Island plays in about an hour. Each turn, players take an action and play a fate card that makes an event more likely to happen as well as a target more likely for the event. Actions include foraging for food, scavenging for valuables washed up ashore, and lighting the signal fire. Of course, it might be easier to forage for food in your neighbor's stockpile. Conflicts are resolved by comparing total size on each side of a fight. A random card is added to each side's total.
At the end of the turn, look to see if a boat was sighted and the signal fire lit. If the players aren't yet rescued, Fate will deal a blow to somebody, then everybody must either eat food or take a wound.
Secret love and hate determines victory points.
- Really good
- Really good
- Survival on an island
- An island
- Lifeboat
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- This is just a really solid deck builder.
- It's one of those games that if you're going to bring something to a table that's got a lot of new players, I think it's a fantastic choice.
- It's probably going to take you about 15 minutes to set up.
- But it's a game that feels substantial and it feels like you've accomplished something.
References (from this video)
- Each spot on the island does something different, allowing for better balancing.
- Fixes issues with Lifeboat, such as psychopaths having no incentive to survive.
- Lifeboat was the original and got more attention.
- Island
- Lifeboat
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- AI generation — The game uses AI generation for events, such as grunts attacking or lava marching across the map.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- the one other game that took us by surprise was Crackle or Rackle, which is a drawing game where you draw a word.
- It's a Viking game without much Viking Vikinging.
- Endeavor Deep Sea, amazing if anybody's played that.
- It's one of those games where you think you can just do better every next no next game I'll do more you know better.
- It's a really good poker dice game that from Schmidt and it's No one ever talks about it and it's so good.
- The games were all the library. It's all for charity, by the way.
- We sold $11,500 worth of games in an hour.
- It's like, "Oh, you have Mestre Schmidt 57. Amazing."
- I just got talked into reviewing a a war game because I like the people. They're so nice. I was like, I don't like war games.
- It's like, "Wow, this is cool."
- I mean, they're like, "Take them, right?"
- It's a year-long internship. It's life-changing.
- I am on the verge of victory here.
- He can take any stealth card from the discard pile.
- It's really good. You see James Bond just losing his mind screaming at people.
- The Phoenician scheme. Asteroid City is not in the box set.