WBG Score: 8/10
Player Count: 2-5
You’ll like this if you like: The Original Survive game, Take that, Forbidden Island
Published by: Zygomatic
Designed by: Julian Courtland-Smith
This is a free review copy. See our review policy here.
Survive: Escape from Atlantis! first came out in 1982. 1982?! Can you believe it? It still blows me away such great games were round in the 70's and 80's like this and Cosmic Encounter and yet everyone still went out and board Monopoly! What were they thinking? Anyway... The game saw various reimplementation's over the years, including a gorgeous 30th anniversary edition that I own. There are also a number of expansions that bring in new elements, change player count options, and introduce friendly dolphins. In 2024 a new edition came out with a slightly new name, Survive The Island. What has changed? What's new? And does this game stand the test of time. Is it still good? Let's get it to the table and find out.
How To Set Up Survive The Island
First, place the main board in the centre of the table and place the five Sea Monster meeples in their designated spaces on the four corners of the board and the central space. Next, place all the tiles in the central areas as indicated by the black line. Randomly place them without looking at the bottom of the tile. The tiles are made up by land, forest, and mountain artwork. Try to spread these out, but a few clusters of each is fine, and actually looks aesthetically pleasing!
Each player now takes a player board in their colour, along with their ten meeples. Look at the bottom to see the meeples' individual scores. Each player will have two Meeples each offering one, two, three, four, and five points respectively. Now, each player places their meeple onto one land tile, one by one, until all Meeples are on the island. Once the Meeples are placed, players cannot look at their scores on the bottom again until the final scoring takes place. You need to try and remember where each one is. Each player will now place two rafts onto spaces next to the Island. Place all remaining rafts, the Shark and Kaiju meeples, and the dice beside the board. You are now ready to play.
How To Play Survive The Island
Players will now take it in turns to carry out three actions in order. First, they will move their Meeples three spaces. The idea of the game is to rescue as many Meeples as possible from the sinking island and get them to one of the four corners of the board where more stable land awaits. So, as you move your Meeples, you will be moving them onto the rafts you positioned during setup and then sailing towards the island. Sounds simple? This game is far from simple. The Meeples can move up to three, but in the water, they can only ever move one space. And in the rafts, you can only move a raft that you have a majority of Meeples in or that is empty. If you have one Meeple in a raft, but another player has two Meeples present, that raft is now out of your control.
Once players have moved their Meeples, they must now remove one land tile. When all the land tiles are gone, you must start to remove the Forest tiles. When they are gone, the Mountain tiles start to go. Any Meeples on a tile that is taken this way immediately fall into the sea, staying in the location the tile once stood. Flip the tile you removed and look at the icon on the bottom. If it has a red background, the tile has an immediate action. Creatures appear, Whirlpools suck away all nearby rafts and Meeples, and Volcanoes signal the end of the game. When you flip the third volcano (all present on the mountain tiles), the game ends.
The tiles also have helpful actions such as generating rafts and offering players extra powers on their turn. The green tiles offer other benefits. If you take one of these, add it secretly to your player board, and you can activate this later on any turn. These tiles offer powers to fight back attacks from the Sharks of Kaiju, and even friendly dolphins that help your Meeples in the water swim towards safety.
Once an isle has been removed and the action on the back carried out, the active player must then roll the creature die. This will activate one of the three types of creatures on the board: Sharks, Kaiju, or Sea Serpents. If they are not present on the board, nothing happens. But if they are, and remember the game starts with all five Serpents present, so they always activate, then the active player must move the shown creature. The player board shows clearly what each creature's movement looks like. The Sharks move in the same way; they can move up to three spaces and always go for the nearest swimmer. If they move onto a space with a meeple in the water, then that meeple is removed from the game. The Kaiju target the boats. Whereas the Serpent has a relentless desire for anything in its path, destroying rafts and meeples alike!
Players continue taking turns like this, trying to get as many Meeples as possible to safety until either the third Volcano is found, and the game immediately ends, or all players run out of Meeples. Either getting them all to safety, or more likely, killed! Players then look at all Meeples who were rescued, checking their individual score on the bottom of each Meeple. You may have rescued far more Meeples than any other player, but you won't know if you have won or not until this point. Two five Meeples can defeat five Meeples from another player if no four or five-point Meeples were rescued.
Is It Fun? Survive The Island Board Game Review
Ok, first. What has changed? Well, the big change is this game now plays up to five players, whereas the original and 30th-anniversary editions are for four players only. You needed an expansion to make it work for five. Other than that, there are just a few aesthetic changes. The player boards are new. They offer a quick refresher as to how your game works, and what each monster does. Some of this information used to be on the board itself. So, the board now is a little cleaner. Although, even though it now plays up to five, it is smaller. Just by a little and the number of tiles is the same. It's just a little more condensed, which works better as the previous board was a touch too big for my table! And this new one is still large and offers a great table presence. Also, with a slightly smaller board, comes a more traditional size box. Much more aesthetically pleasing on my shelf! The only other change is the removal of the Whales, and introduction of the Kaiju. Oh, and the Sharks, mysteriously, are now green, not blue.
As such, if you own the original, or the 30th-anniversary edition, then this may not be a must-buy for you. Unless you want to play with five and cannot get hold of that expansion. But if you don't own a copy yet, this is the one to buy. It is readily available, a great edition, and offers more flexibility in player count. But is the game any good?
If you enjoy games with a lot of "take-that" in them, then this is a lot of fun. Simple, easy rules, a great gateway, and full of laughs. But you have to accept that when you play this game, you cannot control the situation. Meeples will be lost. There is a lot of luck, uncontrolled variety, and unexpected twists and turns. If you can lean into that and have fun, then this game could well be for you. But if that sounds frustrating, then you may want to look elsewhere. However, when I play this with my family, we sit on either end of this scale. Some of us like this randomness. Others find it 'strategically frustrating'! So, I tried playing it cooperatively. A crazy little house rule where we set ourselves a target score of ten points per player, so a total of thirty points with three players, and we then play the game as usual, but trying to help each other rather than hinder each other. When one person has an unlucky moment, others now do not laugh. It hurts all players. And likewise, if one player gets lucky, well, then we all benefit. I am not saying that this is a way I would encourage others to play, but it certainly works with my family as I recognize we have different agendas when we play games like this.
However, with my daughter in a tow, where each player control two lots of meeples, otherwise the game is the same, we have a blast. Both her and I love games like this and we find the back-and-forth take-that hilarious and ruthlessly fun.
But I think the best advice to have fun with this game is to go into it knowing your meeples won't make it. Expect them to die. Do you hope to save them all? That is not realistic. Understand there are 'uncontrollables' in this game and see it as more of a family party game than a strategic experience, and you may well just have a blast. I personally prefer something heavier with more agency, but when I play this game with this mindset, I have a great time with it. The speed of the game is perfect. You can play in 30 minutes easily with three players, and turns fly by. The island very quickly starts to disappear, and your meeples will be fleeing in all directions. There is some random pandemonium in this game that ramps up so fast, and I love it. But if you don't expect that, if you don't embrace that, if you don't understand that is why you are playing this game, you will become frustrated. A Sea Serpent destroying three of your Meeples on a boat in one foul sweep based on the roll of a die when they are one space from safety and a potential 14 points can be mind-numbingly excruciating. Unless you expect that to happen, and simply rejoice on the odd occasions when it doesn't happen!
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