The inspiration for Robinson Crusoe comes from the classic novel of the same name by Daniel Defoe. What follows that, though, is some of the most finely designed multiplayer survival “gaming” in existence. The carpenter (good at building stuff), the cook (good at staving off hunger), and the other characters you can choose from are all about as thematically perfect as you can get. Whether landing by happenstance or being tied up and led to an unfortunate (for you) place called Cannibal’s Island, the odds are stacked quite high against you in this game. And that’s why we love it.
Robinson Crusoe, as a game, is attractive because you play flat-out with sharper strategic skills and earn resource management wins. If you are looking for a semi-adventure as a step up from the Caribbean Sea or the Forbidden Desert, this will do much better for you. The game will put you up against the weather, the ocean, a difficult pair of choices, and even the wildlife of the island with which you have to contend. Can you survive until the rescuing ship comes to get you? Well, can you?
I really like Robinson Crusoe, because with this game, you are the center of gravity; you are the protagonist. Every single thing that happens, no matter how random it may seem, actually happens to you, the one who must confront the problem and find a solution. Every Act of God, man, and beast conspires to make you remember. Because this game deals in fate and not luck, when you win (and even when you lose, given the design’s clever way of spreading despair over time), you feel odd for this to be a table-bound pastime. You are not supposed to win—not really—but when you do pull off against all odds, you get a memory.+K in prospect, which is itself a little victory over amnesia.
To start, pick any scenario you like. That’s what I usually do and it works fine. You might want to pick “the knight and the sword,” since the booklet uses it as the example everywhere, for the sake of familiarity. But really, you can also do a “settlers and a land dispute” scenario and it’ll probably work out just fine. Once you’ve picked your scenario, put the corresponding scenario sheet in its place on the game board. There’s a nice little spot that’s reserved just for holding the current scenario sheet. And we’re using the word “sheet” here in the nice old sense of the term, meaning a rather large piece of paper with quite a bit of information on it.
The board is divided into many sections. There are different spaces for the handy island tiles, although less handy resource cubes, event cards, and various tokens. The island tiles should be shuffled to your heart’s content and then placed in a neat stack next to the game board. Then, draw the top tile and place it in the “always-unhappy-with-you” raft space on the board. But because the top tile was not placed in the way my kindergartener tries to defeat gravity, and the next tile is still an “unreachable” tile, the next space is filled with a festive amount of exploration tokens — and this is before you can hear the whispers of the island that are bound to send any unfortunate castaways to far-off places.
The next step is for the players to choose one of four unique characters as part of their teams. Each character has a certain set of special abilities laying latent within them. Once characters have been selected, each player must then take the character card and set it down on the table in front of them. Even if it was the last game of the last round of the previous day that sat there, getting to know the hero that will make or break this adventure is worth keeping an eye on before that eye falls on a dice roll or a resource draw. Each character has a certain number of limited-edition resources that they can work from. Any instructions for passing out starting resources will be in the scenario sheet.
Get the event deck ready by mixing up the event cards and then placing them in the specially given area. They are what drive the element of luck and surprise in the game, making every round a unique experience. Build the adventure decks next. You kind of have to admire the deck-building aspect of the game, because those too are what drive the story, the experiences you have, and the actions you take.
The weather dice and tokens should be set up near the gaming area. Weather plays a big part in Robinson Crusoe and can cause the player to face additional challenges. The weather factor is always determined in the first part of the game, as well as in the third part when the player is asked to reenact a part of the scenario. If a player is asked not to use a dice church during the setup, then this is when the majority of weather effects will come into play.
Put the invention cards in the designated area; each card stands for something the players can build. The pay-offs for these cards can be pretty significant. You might get a card that allows you to build a spear, for example. Or one that lets you construct something the game calls a “sling.” Or you might get… “a fire.”
The adventure starts on the island, with all aspects of the game now in place and ready. The introduction—providing both an immediate sense of action and a detailed, solid path of setup—is complete. All game components are prepared and in their proper place. Now, at last, an adventure can truly begin, with a sense of theater that merges tension and excitement!
How players experience the game.
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island provides a deep and satisfying way to embody the problem-solving and decision-making skills of the shipwrecked 18th-century hero as he fights to stay alive. The makeshift economics he uses to scrape together his bare necessities is inspiring, quite clever, and, most importantly, functions well as the core of the gameplay.
In the first phase—the Event Phase—players draw an event card and follow the narrative parts of the cards. The narrative drives the card’s effect. The event that’s written there is what happens. And the best kinds of events are those that either force really difficult decisions on the participant—like when do you decide to cut off one of your group members who’s making the group weak; or in order to satisfy the morale track you have to kill the one person in your party who killed your mother?
—OR force the player to evolve their strategy by giving them problems for which the right solution has to be formulated with whatever group setup they have.
Next comes the Morale Phase. The group’s morale is evaluated, and if it’s high, the players receive determination tokens. These can be spent to activate special abilities. But if morale is low, the players may lose health, paying the inexorable toll of physical and psychological privation in this private hell. In which case, you’ll need to spend your determination to make sure you stay alive.
The core of the game is the Action Phase, when we give our characters assignments that further our aims.
We do some or all of the following over the course of 8 turns: send characters to acquire resources, like wood or stone, for necessary in-game construction projects; send characters out to explore new areas, thereby gaining “risk cards” that might either help or hurt us, and in the process maybe acquiring new leads; build structures necessary for not only surviving but also thriving in the game world (for instance, sending two characters to build a structure halves the amount of time said structure would take to build if one person were doing it).
What draws players into the Action Phase is the serendipity of the adventure cards. Undertaking one of the half dozen or so actions in this phase might allow you to draw such a card, which almost always pushes the story in a new or at least unexpected direction. A friend you’ve made on the voyage could return to visit your cabin and give you a little way—both in the moment of the happening and in the narrative tension that then resides in your Explorer Deck.
In the Weather Phase, the whims of nature become the players’ cross to bear. Players roll dice to see what kind of severe weather, if any, is headed their way. They might get a light rain, they might get something worse. From there, they have to make decisions, both individually and together, that will serve to keep their overall group health from dropping too low while not losing sight of their intended goal for that chapter.
In the end, the Night Phase is for relaxation and recovery. Yet, it is in this phase that characters must consume the food they’ve gathered to maintain their health. If characters have a good stock of food, this phase can be a time of relative peace considering the stress that characters are likely under during both the Sunrise and Daylight Phases. Building shelters and crafting items make up the “home front” experience for the character when they aren’t on the move, and it’s also time spent in building potential food stores. Health is harder to regain in this experience without food, so that makes this Night Phase all the more crucial for the character’s survival in the experience.
These different facets of the game keep changing in exciting ways, turn after turn, until you’ve either accomplished your mission or lost. Each coversation of the game is very engaging… and wonderfully different because it never seems to play out the same way twice. Even one central game premise—that you’re mimicking the life of a powerful secret society in service of ancient, eldritch forces—can be the kind of crazy-fun-to-declared-yet-absurd-backstory-taken-seriously that makes for a good game.
Robinson Crusoe has high replay value. The base game comes with several different scenarios, and each one can evolve in its own particular way. A player will never go through two identical games. Even when players introduce event and adventure cards—such stuff as storms, friendly rescues, and rival pirate ships (dammit!)—those set up familiar scenarios for players to refresh with a new twist. Of course, if you don’t like the core of the game, you won’t dig what you’re not going to get in surprising scenarios. But I think it’s a standout strength, and I don’t see that viewpoint ever wavering in my evil plans.
One big advantage of this game is its collaborative aspect. In Robinson Crusoe, it is all but required that gamers collaborate, drawing on the ensemble cast’s various abilities and, when necessary, covering up for each other’s deficiencies to stay alive and keep hope alive. The act of discussing the game state—Is it better to do this or that? Should we go here or there?—forms the decisions that give a game of Robinson Crusoe much of its depth, intensity, and, yes, fun. “We spent hours debating the best path to take in a particular moment of the game.” In such memorable circumstances, Nick and his friends found themselves in fierce, life-or-death territory, that of the hungry belly or the beast-in-a-cage rules of unwinnable games.
The quality of the components in Robinson Crusoe is top-class. The game is physically appealing and rich, with brightly colored, beautifully illustrated cards; intricate and clear tokens; and a game board that makes players feel tangibly immersed in a verdant world of the increasingly gargantuan and deadly threats lurking in the forest. And the game itself is a huge physical object, a weighty empty box that comes to life when you start moving its components around on the obviously well-considered and well-constructed board.
