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Imagine a realm where adorable and clever animals live in harmony, crafting mechanical islands with an array of whirring gears, spinning propellers, and gleaming steel. This is the world of Propeller Islands, a board game where players become island architects, harnessing the power of energy crystals to build marvels of wonder and ingenuity.
Each turn, you take dice from a shrinking pool and use them to gain new structures, produce resources, or populate your buildings. The game features a wide variety of buildings, many of which can be upgraded, allowing for countless combinations of island layouts and strategic possibilities. As you build your islands, they can unlock unique and powerful new abilities. You must carefully manage their resources, balance risk and reward, and outwit your opponents to emerge victorious.
The game will end after a round when one of the following conditions occurs:
- the supply of building tiles is exhausted
- one player completed their seventh blueprint
- one player transferred all their workers onto their island.
At this point you flip over the Forge to reveal the victory point track. Players receive points for their fame, leftover resources, island tiles and completed blue prints. The player with the most points wins.
—description from the publisher
- smart animals building islands with gears and energy crystals
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Dice Drafting — Players draft dice to strategize and outbuild competitors.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Aloha and welcome to Tangal Studio 808.
- I'm Psychic Larry and this is the block video for the first half of April 2025.
- This video is sponsored in part by SmartUp.
- As always, let me know in the comments which games you are interested in and maybe which games I left out that you may be backing.
- And until next time, aloha.
References (from this video)
- Good entwined drafting and engine building gameplay.
- Excellent gateway to dice drafting, tile laying, and engine building.
- Lovely presentation with fantastical islands and animals.
- Gameplay is a bit too lightweight compared to its predecessor.
- The switch to six-sided tiles removed a challenging restriction that the host enjoyed.
- Making gadgets and gizmos
- Fantastical Islands
- Old West Empressario
- Glenmore 2
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Engine Building — and engine building gameplay
- entwined drafting — The crux is um it's entwined drafting. [...] Whenever I grab a die, I am also grabbing an associated tile that I'm going to add to my island.
- tile laying — Whenever I grab a die, you know, because they're all laid out on the main board, I have three different tiles to pick from [...] Now they are hex's, six-sided tiles.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- And countryside is a freaking phenomenal.
- This is one of the best engine building games I have played this year.
- It is very likely going to make it into my top 10 games of the year. It is that good.
- My number three of the month is Rising Cultures.
- Number two is Druids of Adora.
- It's classic feld, making a comeback.
- Number one, Furnish Duel.
- A game that will not be coming out until 2026 will very likely make it into my top 10 games of 2026.
References (from this video)
- The reviewer is excited for this game.
- Old West Empresario
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Dice Tower.
- Lou Zocchi has passed away.
- He is credited with inventing the 100-sided die.
- If you like polyhedral dice, he is one of the the the fathers of that, for sure.
- The Mensa Select winners were announced.
- This is a great slate of games.
- A new trick-taking game from Daniel Newman, New Mill Industries.
- Guillotine's back, baby.
- This was designed in 1998, so it's 28 years old.
- This is the first game I ever played that had had royal guards in it that were worth one if you had one, two if you had two, three if you had three and I was like, this is insanely cool.
- Avalon Hill has made actually several announcements.
- This particular picture that I'm showing you previous in deluxe I really kind of think they should have showed something else because that is an upgrade, right? But that doesn't make me think deluxe, it's just like, oh, that's the new edition.
- So Mayfair is still around and I guess still reprinting things, which is good to see, but but without Catan, they were suddenly a much smaller company.
- Layers is a two-player dungeon crawl game sort of It's like Battleship where you build your own dungeon and the other person goes through it.
- I like the base game, I give it a seven. I gave the expansion a nine though. That's all that content makes Layers amazing.
- This is for Unmatched Adventures.
- Get rid of exclusives. And you know what? Later, put it on retail. This is the perfect way to do it.
- Fin Span has a new expansion that you can pre-order well, in 4 days, April 27th.
- Join us in 38 minutes where we'll be announcing the Dice Tower Award nominations.