Matthew BaileyGame 1 of our “Fantastically Festive Christmas School Holidays 2023 Marathon” is “Nautilus Island,” a set collection game themed around being shipwrecked on a deserted volcanic island and coming across an abandoned submarine called the Nautilus.
Played with Jack(.8.) and Toby(5).
Essentially, what you are trying to do in the game is gather sets of equipment in six different colours. You lay the cards in equal piles, as can be seen in the photographs, with some piles face up and some piles face down. You all start on one side and choose which column you are going to take. As subsequent rounds continue, this uses what I like to call “King Domino” rules, where the last person to go gets to be the first person to choose where they go next time, giving a risk-reward element to going for the piles of three treasures over the smaller piles.
The slight push-your-luck element of the game comes where essentially, instead of having a pickup turn, you can lay cards into piles in front of you. These are new bonus tokens that can be laid on top of what you just laid, giving you extra points or multiplying the score that you have in that set. You can continuously add to the pile, but at some point, you can choose to close the pile off, and if you do that, you then get to take one of the “porthole” tokens which give you a great amount of points but mean that you can no longer lay anything on that pile.
The game finishes when one of the rows is empty, and everyone has had a final turn.
You then add up all the points and see who won.
It’s a fairly simple game that we all enjoyed playing, although I think a little more complexity might have interested us slightly more. You definitely need a few playthroughs of this to get an idea of when you should be laying and when you should be taking, and once we had played three games, we all had a pretty reasonable idea.
I think this is a really good game for kids who potentially are too old theme-wise for the “My First” style of game but do not have a lot of experience with modern board games.
Component quality is good; the meeples are attractive, and all of the cardboard components are well made. I do have one small gripe in that the cards are quite shiny, and the way you lay the piles out on the board is really close to one another, which means as you try to take cards from the piles, you invariably end up nudging the cards next to them, which is something that we did almost every time one of us picked up a card, and that was actually pretty annoying.
I would say this is a perfect board game cafe game, which I would recommend if you potentially do not have a lot of experience with more modern board games and are looking for something to introduce some new mechanics that you potentially haven’t seen but are not ready to choose something more complex.
