How about a tile-laying legacy game?
🏝️My Island is a tile-laying legacy game, that builds upon the success of My City, which implemented this concept in 2020. Basically, you will play 24 subsequent games, each time unlocking something new and permanently altering your game. 😉 For each victory, players can mark off circles on their board, which will ultimately decide who wins after the 24th game. Although you could play the ‘eternal mode’ after the campaign, I think the main appeal is the novelty of the legacy element.
The most apparent change from My City is the hex-based grid instead of a square-grid. 🧐 Tiles depict 4 terrain types: houses, fields, walls and paths - you will want to optimally place these according the scoring rules of your chapter. As an example, as the game begins you have to place houses on the outer beach 🏖️ circle of your island to score points, and you want to fill up every beach space to avoid getting negative points. There is one primary rule that will make your life hard: ☝️ You have to place tiles adjacent to already played tiles, and at least one terrain type has to be placed next to the same type.
⚙️Gameplay is very simple: everyone has a set of tiles and there is a deck of cards that depict these. Each round a card will be drawn, and everyone has to place that tile on their own island board. You play until either the deck runs out, or players all decide to stop. There is an inherent randomness to the card draw, but you can somewhat plan for it and leave some holes as you wait for the ideal tile. 🤞 As tiles start to run out, you can better anticipate what shapes will be coming.
💬The first few games will a bit barebone, which is good if you are playing with newcomers. Otherwise you have to power through the first few games to unlock some important core rules. But still, the game comes with 8 sealed envelopes and it’s always so fun thinking about what will come next. 🤔 I also like how even losing is fun, because then you get some stickers to modify your game to have better odds next time. It’s just a very enjoyable low-stress game that you can easily play in 15-20 minutes. 😊
Have you played My Island or My City?
Review copy by @kosmos_verlag
