The Isle of Feld

Whenever Stefan Feld releases a new board game, I'm eager to take a look. His latest, La Isla, also happens to be #10 in Alea's "medium box" series -- a run of games with roughly (very roughly) a similar level of complexity and number of components. There have been hits and misses in the series, but I still have the entire set. Feld is an interesting designer to add to this collection, because his games tend to be more complex and sophisticated on average than most of these medium-box games. Feld has succeeded before with a simpler system (in The Speicherstadt). Could he do it again?

In La Isla, players are explorers on an isolated island, looking for species of animals thought to be extinct elsewhere in the world. The board is an interesting geometric puzzle, a 10-sided core shape around which 10 more jagged tiles converge to create the island. Animal tokens are scattered throughout, with intervening spaces where players will ultimately position their explorers. When you completely surround an animal with your explorers, you claim that token. Explorers are placed using pairs of resource tokens, specifically matched to the space you want to take.

The core mechanism for doing all this is simple but clever. Each round, you draw three cards. Each card has three different aspects to it: a rule it lets you break (for now and potentially several turns to come), a resource it lets you gather, and an animal type for which you score. You must use exactly one of your three cards for exactly each one of the three purposes.

The result is a fun series of pressures as you try to prioritize. Sometimes, the usefulness of certain cards for certain things is crystal clear. But often, you'll want to use the same card for two different things. So what's most important, you have to ask yourself: do you need that resource for playing your explorers, or do you need the quick victory points? You also get to keep a maximum of three abilities in play at once, so soon you must also ask which old power to cover up to make room for a new one.

La Isla is rather short for a Stefan Feld game, taking only 30-45 minutes to play -- but that feels about right for this game. There aren't as many different things to consider as in, say, Amerigo, but the game comes to a conclusion before the "A-B-C" decision process can become repetitive. In any case, the game isn't at all one-note. You can try for easily surrounded animals to collect more of them, or more difficult ones that are worth more points. You can bend your choices to fit the card powers you draw, or focus more on resources. You can try to capture multiples of one animal and score for it as often as possible, or try for a full set of five different animals -- and the bonus points such a set awards.

With so many gems in Stefan Feld's catalog, I can't truly dub La Isla a new favorite of mine. Still, it is one of the better medium-box games to come along in a while, and certainly seems like it will be interesting for many playthroughs to come. I give it a B+.