Island Escape

There's plenty of talk about the separation between real "Euro games" and the sorts of mass market games everyone has heard of. That line is rather blurry now, considering how many crossover games you can now find in a Target store -- games like Catan, Ticket to Ride, and Carcassonne. But it's always been a bit of a blurry line. I remember falling in love with Scotland Yard when I was younger, and though it was a game stocked in mass market stores, it certainly wasn't a game I'd ever find, say, at my grandma's house next to Yahtzee or Monopoly.

Fond memories of Scotland Yard always make me open to try new "1 vs many" games. Recently, that saw me playing Treasure Island. One player takes on the role of Long John Silver, hiding his treasure somewhere on the island game board. The other players move around trying to find and dig up the treasure, using LJS's cryptic clues to narrow the search.

There are actually a lot of common elements between Treasure Island and Scotland Yard. LJS is always required to reveal a clue to the other players on his turn, but he has a built-in mechanism for obscuring the clue in moments where he's feeling cornered. Geographic process of elimination is the general shape of both games.

But there are a lot of differences between the games, too. The board and many other components are made of a material that works with dry-erase markers, so the gameplay involves lots of plotting and drawing on maps. There's an actual compass you attach a pen to for drawing arcs, and rulers for drawing crisp and straight lines. Also, the other players aren't totally working as a team against Long John Silver. Only one person can win the game -- the player who finds the treasure (or LJS, if he escapes) -- so players have incentives not to always share every piece of information they gather in secret.

A particularly engaging mechanic in the game is the way Long John Silver can bluff the players. He's required to give open information to the players once each round, in the form of a card. Each of those cards gets marked with a face down token. In most cases, LJS must tell the truth. In two instances during the game, he may place a token instead that indicates the information provided may have been a lie. There are ways for the players to look at the tokens and ferret out a possible bluff... but then, the competition between the players makes it so that you can't necessarily take another player at their word. It's a healthy portion of "social deduction game" mixed in with the rest of the system.

These twists are clever, but have some issues in implementation. First, each player has a unique marker color -- but two of them are terribly chosen. Those color markers blend into the board easily, making the gameplay overly difficult in a way the designers surely didn't intend.

Second, the concealment of secret information is actually rather awkward. Each player has a personal map to record things they know that the other players don't. But obviously, not everyone can have their own sprawling game board. So the game includes smaller mini-maps for personal info, and in-scale versions of the compass and rule tools so that players can draw on their personal maps accurately. In theory, anyway. There's enough room for lack of precision here that it's not hard to imagine it affecting the game every now and then. The rules are explicit: Long John Silver is always supposed to resolve any ambiguous case in favor of the players... but a slightly misdrawn line here or there might result in a case where different players have different takes on whether something is ambiguous.

Balance is also very tricky with this game. Of course, BoardGameGeek is full of gamers who, after just one or two plays of a game that was likely playtested dozens or hundreds of times, are certain that they know better than a game's designer what the balance of the game is. But the game doesn't really offer any rules that help scale for familiarity (or lack of it) with the system. And it seems like the game will be inevitably lop-sided until you get several plays under your belt.

It being open-ended in how much players cooperate with each other is tricky too. On the one hand, it's nice that the game leaves some agency with the players on this. On the other hand, it does seem balanced for a group of players more willing to share information freely with each other for the sake of beating Long John Silver, even though only one player can win. With more competitive players reluctant to sacrifice themselves for "the greater good," it feels like LJS will just win every time. And this feels like a bit too strong a social aspect that's at odds with the larger, deductive tone of the game.

I would play Treasure Island again -- in particular as I've yet to experience it as the Long John Silver player. But it didn't capture my imagination as fully as other 1-vs-many games, or even the quirky 1-vs-many-yet-also-fully-cooperative Mysterium. I give Treasure Island a B-.