#2 – Forbidden island
The adventurer cards in this game functioned as specializations for each character, wherein we all had different powers we could use to achieve certain ends. I found that this mechanism became most consequential to achieving our objective, because whether we played highly collaborative, or less so, these cards held significant impact. In terms of highly collaborative gameplay, we found ourselves, for lack of a better term, stacking adventurer cards during our “thinking session”. Essentially, we would take about 5 minutes after every 3 turns of play; during this time we would take stock of all logistically relevant circumstances, and we would plan for what 3 adventurer plays to make, if any at all, given that each player only gets 3 actions. This aided greatly in our success during the game because we could be sure that what one player was doing would not be deleterious to the progress of the team or another specific player. Another mechanism that I found very enjoyable was the “shoring up” action. I could not use the mechanism as much as I wanted to given that it could only be used for adjacent tiles, but the power to unflood an area became very useful in one particular instance where there was a flooding happening on a tile near me that a teammate wanted to get to because they would be able to capture the treasure because they would have more moves for their turn, and I was able to use my proximity and last move to unflood the space so that my teammate could make their move safely. This was more so useful, not because my teammate couldn’t move to the flooded spot, but because it would have likely sunk and henceforth stranded and killed them if it had been left that way. An interesting way that the overall objective of the game functioned was in the way that it was rather zeroed in. Meaning, in some other games, such as Catan, I noticed that the broader winstate of the game became less in the forefront of my mind as smaller objectives seemed to hold equal or even more weight than achieving a victory point, and things like trading in and of themselves became a game. However, in Forbidden Island, I think that the combination of it being a collaborative game, and the goal being to capture rather than build up to something made the larger objective stay completely in focus. I ended up playing about 4 games of Forbidden Island; as such, around the 3rd time, we decided to up the difficulty by starting at a higher water level. What I found most intriguing about this kind of moldable mechanism, was that it kept the game from getting static, but in a way that did not require any ostensibly drastic changes to the functions of the game. At one point we decided to begin at legendary just to see how terrible we would play, and we were not disappointed in finding that we did very poorly. However, there was a sense that we could actually win because we were able to choose this difficulty, and no other quality within the game changed.
