Forbidden Island and St Petersburg - 10th December 2014

A first play for Forbidden Island, David's birthday present from James. It's a well produced co-operative game where the players are adventurers attempting to find and collect a set of artefacts from a sinking island. Tension mounts as parts of the island become flooded and are eventually destroyed, requiring a balance between "shoring up" (repairing the flooded zone) and the hunt. Andy and James made good use of their special abilities (diagonal movement and two shore-ups for one action respectively) where as David never found an opportunity to use his "Diver" ability to swim across lost zones.

The game gradually progressed from us moving around easily to us defending critical areas and routes as the waters rose, although we never felt under a huge amount of pressure and completed the game. It was a fun and quick little game, but let down by a critical problem. As we all have identical goals (including keeping everyone alive) there was often an obvious right move at each step. In the end it felt that the three of us were jointly playing a one player game. A rummage on the BGG forums suggests that this is a common complaint, but short of forbidding or restricting conversation during the game it seems a difficult thing to fix.

We followed this up with another game of St Petersburg. Ever had one of those games where one player completely dominates? James built up a huge income and managed to get to a full 10 aristocrats - something we very rarely see. By the end of the game he had so much money that he was buying stuff he didn't want just to set up the next round the way he wanted it. How did this happen? One thing was James picked up the Observatory at the beginning of the game - something that can be a huge help for the aristocrat collection strategy. Also Andy and David made a mistake early on and both overspent leaving them without much money for workers. If one of them had done that it probably wouldn't have had much of an effect, but with both out in the same round, James picked up enough workers to set himself up with a large income. With James concentrating on aristocrats, David was able to switch to a building heavy strategy, building up an in-game lead, although he was unable to stop the aristo-geddon at game end. It's a great game.

Final score: James 134, David 120, Andy 97.