Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is designed by Ignacy Trzewiczek. I have the Z-Man Games edition but it has also been published by Portal. It supports 1-4 players and takes around two hours to play, depending on how long it takes you to die.
Survivor’s Journal Day #1:
We washed up on the island, it looks beautiful but we’ve yet to explore anywhere except the beach and I have an eerie, unsettling feeling. As I look into the shadows of the jungle I feel there are all manner of dangers lurking, waiting for us to give up our souls. But there’s hope, for if we scavenge some wood and build a fire we can catch the attention of passing ships…yet we also need to build a camp and a shelter, for although the skies are clear winter is coming and we’ll need protection from the storms. I try to focus on the calm rippling on the sea but the darkness calls me, and my eyes drift towards the heart of the island, wondering what secrets it holds.
Survivor’s Journal Day #7:
We’ve managed to build a rudimentary shelter out of some bamboo, but it looked rotten so I’m not sure how long it will hold. It didn’t help that the carpenter hit his hand with a hammer and now his hand is swollen. We haven’t managed to gather any wood and the nights are gradually getting colder, although thanks to the Soldier we’ve managed to eat on some beasts we found prowling nearby, but he’s got a crazy look in his eyes and I’m worried that the blood of beasts will not be enough to satisfy his lust for battle.
Survivor’s Journal Day….I’ve lost track:
Madness. How…I don’t know. I feel like I’ve lost my mind. Is this real? Can I trust anything. We managed to stockpile some wood but then the shelter collapsed on us and we had to endure a snowstorm. The soldier has been getting more and more extreme. Eventually he found a bear and used the last of our pistols to kill it but not before the bear mauled him. If we have to endure another storm I don’t think he’s going to make it through the night. We still haven’t managed to build a fire and every day is a constant battle to survive and we barely manage to get enough wood. So much has gone wrong and I’m barely clinging to my life and to my sanity. It all seems just a matter of time now, damn this cursed island. Damn it to hell.
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is a co-operative game in which players are survivors on an island. There are six different scenarios included within the game that all have different objectives and some special rules, but in the first scenario you are trying to build a wood pile and a fire so that passing ships will notice and come to rescue you. You have 12 turns to do this, but the ships are only coming on the last three turns. If you manage to light the fire and survive the night you get rescued, if at least one person dies or you do not light the fire by the last turn you lose the game and are damned to live out the rest of your days on the cursed island. There are a lot of rules so this overview isn’t going to be comprehensive by any means, but I want to give you a general idea of how the game flows.
At the beginning each player will choose a role. These all have certain abilities that you’ll be able to use over the course of the game and each role has a specific invention that only they can build.
Each turn happens in different phases and it’s not like most games where players take turns consecutively. The board is laid out in order and first you’ll be drawing an event card, where (usually bad) stuff will happen. After this you will check morale and either receive or discard determination tokens, and then you will receive resources depending on the location of your camp. After this is the planning phase where you will discuss with your partners about what actions to take. You can either resolve the event that you drew, hunt beasts if you have encountered any, explore the island, gather resources from a part of the island, build a shelter, weapons or items, arrange the camp to improve morale or heal. Each player has two pawns and these represent morning and afternoon. So if you put two pawns on something it symbolises that you are spending the whole day and focusing your whole attention, but if you only spend one pawn then you are rushing and may make mistakes…
But the good thing is that you can work together with someone else, so two of you might wan to go exploring in the morning so you can be sure of finding something, while in the afternoon you come back and attempt to build something while the other person stays out and goes gathering.
These actions are resolved in order and this is where the real meat of the game comes in. In the picture of the board you’ll notice that there are three decks of card, brown, black and green, and on these cards are dice. If you only spend one pawn on one of these actions you will have to roll the dice. One dice will determine whether you succeed or not, another will determine whether you receive any wounds, and another will determine whether you have to draw a card. If you draw a card it will usually offer you a choice whether to accept a benefit or discard the card. If you accept the benefit the card will then be shuffled into the event deck and may come back later (so in the little passage above I talked about building a shelter out of rotten bamboo, in game terms I would have drawn a card that said I found some bamboo and I could increase the shelter by two levels, then on a later turn if that card is drawn it would say that the bamboo has rotted and the shelter collapses).
After all the actions have been resolved night begins and you have to feed everyone (if you can’t people take wounds), and at some point you are going to roll weather dice as well. This will determine whether any storms are going to hit you or even a wild beast may attack the camp.
You’ll be exploring, gathering, hunting and generally trying to survive long enough to fulfill the objectives of the scenario, but mostly you’ll be dying and losing the game.
Yes folks, this game is very difficult. I’ve mainly played it with two players (and when you play with one you two you get a little assistance from Friday) but have also played it with three. It was a little easier with three but we still lost and, well, you remember I talked about how there are six scenarios?
I still haven’t beaten the first one yet. This game is very punishing and very cruel, and this may put off some people but even though I haven’t won yet I learn from every game and you start realizing what you have to do to maximise your chances of winning, so it does offer a learning curve and a sense that you’re actually achieving something, and I can’t imagine how sweet it will be when I do win.
Robinson Crusoe offers the perfect blend of strategy, tension, meaningful decisions and theme. It perfectly captures the nail-biting atmosphere of what it must be like to live from gruelling day to gruelling day, trying to take joy in the small victories while having everything else fall apart around you. It constantly keeps you thinking with trying to plan for the future while trying to keep everything patched together and it’s important to strike a balance between the two because you always have to keep in mind that you need to get wood on the pile. Merely surviving isn’t good enough but it’s such a challenge to survive that it’s easy to see that as the priority.
I love how the turn is structured as well. I’m not a huge fan of some co-op games because it feels like people can just dictate moves and I don’t always feel like I’m playing for myself, but this mitigates the problem because you don’t actually have to listen to other players. You all discuss, yes, but you are in control of your pawns and if you want to go ahead and build then you can, and this adds to the experience because when you’re a small group on a desert island you are going to clash and you are going to have to try and compromise, so it all lends itself to the theme, but it’s not a shallow ‘all-flash and no substance’ game at all, there’s a lot of depth and substance to go with the theme. People who like role-playing will enjoy this as well because you can really get into the character, as the carpenter you’ll want to build and build, and if anyone else wants to build you’ll glance at them with suspicion, wondering why they’re encroaching on your area of expertise. As an aside, one good little thing this game does is have the characters be both male and female. It’s only a little thing but it’s nice to have more diversity in the game and make it feel a bit more inclusive.
The really clever thing is the way the cards work. You’re so desperate for a little bit of help that you’ll want to take the benefit but you have to be careful because in the long run it could really hurt you and things can fall apart really quickly. It adds a narrative that makes you analyze the consequences of your actions, and even though there is luck in the game you exert enough control that if you lose you can think of what you did wrong and what you should have done rather than blaming it on a bad dice roll or card draw.
It’s the sort of game where you have so much to do and not enough time to do it in. It’s really, really tense and totally immersive and when I finish although I’m drained I’m also smiling because it’s so fun in its frustration.
So it’s perfect, right? Well, not quite. There are a couple of criticisms. Firstly, I talked about how the cards get shuffled into the event deck. Due to the different backs of the cards you have to either look away while shuffling or do it under the table, otherwise you can see whether the card on top is an ordinary event or one that came from the other decks. It’s only a minor thing and I don’t think there’s another way they could have done it thought.
Secondly, it is worth stressing again just how difficult this is. People are going to get frustrated with the game and may feel that the challenge is too steep, especially as even the introductory scenario is more challenging than I expected. However, I do think it depends on how many people you play with. With three players I find that it’s easier to get enough food for everyone so you can focus on other things, whereas with two it’s more of a struggle, but again this fits the theme as of course it would be more difficult if there’s only two of you on an island.
The biggest criticism however is that there is a LOT going on. I mean, it takes a long time to get to grips with the game and unless you play it regularly you will forget one or two minor things simply because there’s so much to keep track of. Thankfully the game takes account of this and lays out the board in a manner that flows nicely and you can see how the turns unfold. But the rulebook isn’t the clearest and I had to watch a few YouTube videos to get a better understanding. I also downloaded a cheatsheet from the file section on BoardGameGeek, and that helps keep things clear. But if you’re playing with new players it can be daunting when you’re setting it up and pulling out all these pieces and tokens.
Still, those downsides are only minor when it comes to how great this game is. I absolutely love it and it’s one that I am immensely proud to have in my collection. I know that it’s very popular and it may be hard to get a hold of, so keep an eye on when it’s being printed. It’s worth tracking down though. It has that balance of a great story with a great game underneath. It all clicks together and works really well, as a group you’re all in it together but you also want to do things your own way, so you’re not always going to come to a consensus on what is the best action to take and this makes it a good social experience as well. So if you like the sound of it then take the plunge and buy it. Just be prepared to die many times.