- Fun factor – 7/10
- Replay value – 4/10
- Components – 8/10
- Learning Curve – 5/10
My group of 3 dedicated board gamers really enjoyed this game. I play with these same 2 people every single Saturday and most every time we are trying to defeat each other so it was very refreshing to play a fully co-op game that we weren’t entirely bored with after 1/2 a single play through. I have never honestly been challenged by co-op games and thus don’t find much enjoyment out of them.
Robinson Crusoe on the other hand was very fun and refreshing. It was first off a little more challenging than others I have played in the past. While we still won pretty thoroughly we enjoyed the trip the entire way there and didn’t KNOW we had won until the 2nd to last turn. But winning or losing wasn’t really the enjoyment that I think we got out of this one, it took us beyond that, which is rare for a game in my group. I found myself wanting to tell the little story of the island we were on. Reading some of the flavor text and then mangling it into the story of our journey on the island. My group normally is not this way with games, we are very mechanical and tend to save the story telling for our RPG sessions.
I also have to say that almost every component this game has is awesome. With the exception of one (well 3 kinda) set of cubes that were made out of plastic instead of wood for no reason at all that I can think of. Several other sets of cubes are wooden but these were randomly plastic and poorly made plastic at that. The shapes were shifted badly on some of the cubes and they just feel so cheap next to the wooden ones in the same box. I gave this game a 4/5 for components instead of a 5/5 entirely thanks to these pieces. Everything else is very well made.
My biggest complaint about the game is going to be replay. The game comes stocked with 6 missions, each of which I would assume would take about 1.5-2.5 hours. The game clearly seems to think that you will enjoy replaying these missions over and over again but I just don’t see it happening. I suppose that many many things will change between different playthroughs but I really don’t think that any of them will amount to a vastly different experience. One of the key reasons for this is a lack of veriety in other things. There is exactly 1 unused island hex, meaning that if you fully explore the island in your playthrough you will have seen all but a single hex that the game has to offer. I think that my group will really enjoy playing the 6 missions but after that the game will most likely stay on the shelf almost entirely.
I am hopeful that well priced expansions will come out and give me more missions and tiles and stuff but I would not be excited to pay too much for these kinds of expansions.
Lastly, I want to discuss learning the game. My group had a little trouble with this but we had some one who normally doesn’t explain the game doing the explanations for it, which I don’t think went too well. The player who normally does this claims this would have gone better for us if it had been explained better. Hence the 3/5 right down the middle with that one.
mythosgaming 