Fruit Island Preview | A Clever Push-Your-Luck Family Game
Transcript
When I found out that one of the world's most prolific board game designers was releasing a familyweight push your luck game, I immediately had to know more. I'm Dr. Brian McDonald. This is Brains on Games. Let's talk about Fruit Island from Analog Game Studios designed by Riner Nitsia.
This is a preview copy of Fruit Island that was sent to me by the folks over at Analog Game Studios. This is coming to crowdfunding next week as I post this video. I will put information about the campaign in the show notes below, but Fruit Island is a very light, like I said, familyweight game. This is a game for between two and four players. Games take only 15 to 25 minutes to play. And kids aged six and up can figure this game out. What are you trying to do in this light push your luck game? Well, players are going to play as monkeys who are running around an island collecting fruit while trying to evade a gorilla who's going to steal their fruit from them if they're not careful. Players are going to draw fruit tokens and possibly gorilla movement tokens from this bag.
The game is going to end when there are no more tokens left to draw, and the winner is going to be the player who's collected the most fruit. How does this game work? How does one of the most prolific board game designers, Nitsia, has a a list of awards that's as long as my arm for games that he's designed, but how does he design something that's very simple and family familyfriendly while still retaining some strategic complexity or some strategic elements that add tension to the game? Well, this is a game that plays by, like I said, drawing fruit tokens from a bag. Players are going to draw a token, then they're going to place that token on the tree. However, you're sometimes, as I just did, going to draw tokens with a gorilla on them. Now, some of these have coconuts. The gorilla is going to move however many spaces equal to the number of coconuts. And the gorilla does have a facing direction. He's going to move forward starting in the clockwise direction, I believe, if I remember right. And in this case, he's all he's going to do is turn himself around. So, I don't know if you can tell on the camera here, there's a little rotation token. Now, in smaller play counts, if you're playing with less than four people, he'll also move when he turns like that. But in a four player game, all he does is turn around. The next time a gorilla token is drawn, he's going to move in a counterclockwise direction. Once a token is drawn, it's taken out of the game. It just goes back in the box. But if you do draw a token with a gorilla on it, you're going to keep drawing until you get a fruit. Once you do get a fruit, you're going to place that fruit on a tree and then you
have an opportunity to move. You've got a choice of trees here. There are three different kinds of fruit. Uh, and you've got to put your fruit on a matching tree, but you can choose which of the matching trees. Then you have an opportunity to move your monkey. You can move the monkey in any direction, but you can't backtrack. And you're moving that monkey one, two, or three spaces. So maybe I want to move towards the fruit that I just placed. If the monkey lands at the base of a tree, well, nothing happens unless the tree is full. But if you've got a full tree, then the monkey is going to collect all of that fruit. That's going to earn the monkey some victory points potentially if they're able to hold on to them. Eventually, the board is going to look something like this. The trees are going to start to fill up. The monkeys are going to be moved out of the trading post. that monkeys can be landing or standing on the same space, of course, as they're playing through the game. The gorilla is also going to be moving back and forth around this circle. Now, eventually, you'll have a situation like this where you might draw a fruit that will allow you to fill a tree. If you do that, then you're going to want to move onto the base of that tree to grab that fruit before the other players can get their hands on it. So the red player in this case might move down here after placing that fruit and collect those four. There are lots of banana trees and they're pretty easy to fill up. So we we might find ourselves then in a situation like this. Now that the monkeys have some fruit, it starts to become risky for them as the gorilla moves around the track. If somebody happened to draw this gorilla token with four coconuts on it,
what that means is the gorilla is going to move in the direction he's facing four spaces. And if he lands on a square with a monkey, any face up fruit that monkey has gets discarded. They lose those victory points that they would have had for the end of the game. The trick though is that if you're able to get back to the trading post with some fruit, you can turn your fruit face down and now that's protected from the gorilla. Now that now that I've got those face down bananas, I've got two victory points at the end of the game and that's not going to change. Nobody can take those from me. This is why it's a push your luck game. As you start to collect more and more fruit, it's becomes very risky until you get to that trading post to start turning it face down. But we found ourselves as the game progress, we're competing with the other players who are watching the fruit they collect. We're seeing these trees fill up and there are only two pathways into the the trading post and that does make it quite tempting to continue to push your luck to keep moving around the circle and just hoping that you're going to be able to avoid that gorilla.
What skills though are you practicing when you play a game like Fruit Island? Well, there there is definitely a risk assessment element here. You're constantly looking at where's the gorilla? How many gorilla tokens are left in this bag? We never counted the tokens and we did that on purpose. I didn't want everyone to be able to predict, okay, how many gorilla movement tokens are left? We almost always thought, oh, there can't be any. There can't possibly be more of those gorilla movement tokens in the bag and then somebody would draw one. So, we never counted that number. We didn't want it to be too easy to predict because we wanted that luck element and the drama of drawing those those monkeys. But you are constantly evaluating um do I need to race to the trading post and use a turn to guarantee my victory points or can I grab some more fruit instead before I do that? Am I going to get caught by this gorilla as they're moving back and forth around the circle?
There's not too much uh planning in terms of your movement and positioning, but there is that spatial problem solving element of where's my position relative to the gorilla. The gorilla is going to stop if he hits a monkey. So, you may want to be on the other side of another player. You don't have to be the fastest monkey, but you have to be faster than the slowest one. So, you know, the the yellow monkey is pretty safe over here because there's a red monkey in the way. But if the red monkey moves before the yellow one, the red monkey can jump over that yellow. And now it's the yellow one who's who's potentially going to get caught unless the gorilla turns in the other direction. And then because this is a family game that kids are going to be playing, there's also an emotional regulation component. Uh we all laughed if somebody got caught, including the player who got caught by the gorilla.
And if you lose a lot of fruit, we always found that was kind of funny that that you did that. Younger kids maybe might take it a little bit more seriously than we did. So, there's an emotional regulation component to the game as well. Final thoughts though about Fruit Island. Well, this this was a game that surprised me a little bit. Maybe it surprised everybody around the table. It's a family game. It very clearly looks like a game for kids. And I should say, I'm saying final thoughts here, but this is a prototype, a Kickstarter prototype. So, uh, it's going to crowdfunding. Some things might change before the final version gets released. But based on this version of the game, it looks like a kids game and it plays like a kids game. It's meant for families. Some of us around the table were saying, I wish I would have had a game like this when my kids were little.
It's so much better than a game like Sorry, for example, because there are some limited strategic decisions. A downside maybe is that there's a lot of randomness in terms of what you pull from this bag, but you're not going to have a push your luck game without randomness because luck needs to be involved there. So, you've got a game where the rules are simple and the turns go quickly. There's a bit of strategy. There's some player interaction in terms of positioning your monkeys and where you're going to put that fruit, which is, you know, some good basic strategic decisions. And then there's the well what we found to be those funny moments around the table where somebody was trying to get back to the trading post and wound up losing a bunch of points because they got caught by the gorilla. Younger kids might not find it as funny as we did, but we had some laughs when we were playing this one. It's there is that randomness and the games can be quite swingy if you're not careful about banking your points and that can be a downside for some players. But I think with family games, it is important to have some luck element so that the kids sometimes have an opportunity to win and they can laugh at their parents when their parents lose points. So this is this was a good time. I mean, like I said, a good time more when you're playing with younger kids. I think this would have been really fun when my kids were little. They're all grown-ups now.
I played it only with grown-ups, and we did have some laughs while we played, but it is very simple and there's lots of randomness. so much better than roll and move games because there are some strategic decisions. You you're choosing even whether you want to move one, two, or three spaces in which direction you go. I think I think that this is a really fun game for parents with younger kids. I mean, six and up. It's perfect for kids who are starting school and and then there's that little bit of frustration that a child might feel when they get caught and they they lose all of the points that they've gathered because they didn't choose to bank them. They weren't thinking ahead. Kids do have a hard time doing that. Um so I for for me with that group this is a winner. Now are adults going to play this together? I mean, maybe casual gamers would be the folks who would pull this off the shelf and have some laughs while they play. I mean, my group is not like that, though. We do tend to play more medium to heavyweight games. So, uh, this one is very light and we all said, I'd love to play this with the kids. Um, and I do look forward to playing it with some younger kids because I think I I want to introduce them to these kinds of games. This is a gateway game for sure.
Gives you a little bit of experience with push your luck. There's a little bit of tactical um thinking that you have to do here, which is good, too. And you get those laughs when somebody loses their point. So, thanks so much to the folks at Analog Game Studios for sending Riner Nitzia's new game my way. I will, like I said, include some information about the campaign in the show notes below the video, but if you have any questions or comments, you can, of course, leave them in the comment section below, or you can email me at brianbrainsgames.ca. brains.ca is the website. That's where future episodes will go. The previous ones are already up there. Brains onames is the exhandle and the Facebook page and the Instagram feed and the blue sky feed. We're all over the place. If you enjoyed this video, you want to be notified of future ones, you can head on over to YouTube and click that subscribe button. Thanks for joining me and hopefully I'll see you next time.