Game reviews: Love Letter, Forbidden Island, King of Tokyo, Dobble

Okay, time for some more game reviews! I'm reviewing the games I played during our charity gaming marathon for SpecialEffect. Last time I looked at Poo, Tsuro and Ricochet Robots. This time I'm looking at four more board and card games: Love Letter, Forbidden Island, King of Tokyo and Dobble.

Love Letter

In Love Letter all the players are suitors trying to court Princess Annette, and the single card in your hand represents which figure at court is holding your love letter to her – your goal is to end the round with your letter in the hands of someone she trusts the most, and without your letter being found and thrown out. On each player's turn they draw a new card and choose which of the two characters in front of them should hold their letter. The other is discarded face-up for the other players to see, and generates an effect, such as the priest, who lets you see another player's card; the guard, who will eliminate another player if you can correctly guess their card; or the king, who lets you trade cards with another plater. The game rewards careful observation of the discarded cards (which remain visible on the table – you don't need to memorize them) to deduce or guess what cards other players are holding.

It's a simple game, and perfect to fill some time between longer games. I think we played a couple of games during the marathon, and I've played it perhaps a few dozen times. It feels like a good balance of luck and skill – in the short term there will definitely be rounds you can't win, where you're knocked out without even taking a turn or you start with a high value card that you cannot keep concealed for long but that will cause you to lose if you discard it – but over the course of a game there is plenty of time for the luck to balance out. It's not my favourite game, but it's fun and easy to play when you don't have the time or space for a bigger game.

Forbidden Island

This game is hard. It's a co-op game with all the players on the same side – there's no traitor. You're all reckless treasure hunters trying to gather loot from a rapidly sinking island. You need to cooperate to shore up the sinking island long enough to find clues and excavate the four great treasures and escape the island before its inevitable ruin. The clever sinking mechanics mean that some areas of the island will be more vulnerable than others – once an area partially floods you know there's a good chance its card will soon be reshuffled and placed back on top of the flood deck to be drawn again, so you get a sense of panicked desperation as you realise that a critical location is sinking and you need to do everything you can to keep it shored up.

Unfortunately, it's a bit easy to get the rules wrong. The first time we played it seemed quite easy, until we realised that we were incorrectly retaining flooding cards for areas that had been permanently lost to the sea. Instead you're supposed to remove those cards, so the more of the island that sinks into the sea, the faster the rest becomes vulnerable too. Once we had that rule correct we played two more games and failed completely each time.

Each player gets a distinct character with their own unique ability. For example, the diver can swim freely through submerged areas, the engineer can shore up the island faster than anyone else and the helicopter pilot can fly to another point on the island. These help to make sure each player has something different to think about, but they can't entirely stop the game from feeling like one big game of solitaire. Each player shares exactly the same information and has exactly the same goals, and is under no time pressure, so there's some risk that one or two players dominate the decision-making process.

Overall, great fun. I am a bit worried that I'd get bored of it before I got good at it.

King of Tokyo

The is an awesome dice-rolling game that really needs a clearer set of instructions. Players compete as giant monsters stomping through the city causing general mayhem as they vie to become King of Tokyo. On each turn, players roll six dice and may elect to reroll any number of them twice before taking whatever they end up with. The different symbols have different effects - matching numbers score victory points, hearts heal you, lightning bolts charge you up with energy and claws allow you to attack the monster at the centre of Tokyo, unless that's you, in which case you get to attack everyone else. In theory you can win by scoring twenty victory points, but I think every game I've ever played has been won by knockout.

The game gets interesting once you get enough energy to buy new abilities from a selection available to all players. Some abilities might just score points or deal damage, but the most interesting ones give you mutations or powers that might let you roll more dice, spend energy to manipulate the dice or trigger special attacks when you roll certain combinations of symbols. If one monster can get enough special powers they can become almost unstoppable.

My only real complaint with the game is that the rules are so jumbled up that it's really hard to consult them to resolve a point of contention, and sometimes they're sufficiently vague that it's not clear how some combination of abilities interact. They could definitely be better laid out. Still, once you've played a few games you'll be fine.

Dobble

Dobble is an ingenious little all-ages matching game. Each circular card has eight symbols on it, at different orientations and sizes. By some mathematical witchcraft, any pair of cards will share precisely one symbol in common. From that foundation, various different games are derived that all involve racing to spot matches before the other players in order to acquire the most cards, or to discard your own cards first, or something similar. It is surprisingly hard to spot the common symbol. Sometimes it will be obvious quickly, but other times it somehow hides there in plain sight, invisible to you. Good fun, and much more interesting than Snap if you need to play card games with kids!

Next time...

That's all the board and card games. Next time we're onto the video games: Towerfall, Monaco and Nidhogg.