In Isle of Skye, you are all building your own little map of tiles. It reminds me a lot of Alhambra. Which is a compliment. Alhambra is an older German Family-style game that has held up very well for me. (I can see someone also comparing it to Glenn More but I think Isle resembles Alhambra more closely with its tile market)
In Isle of Skye, you create your own market. Everyone draws three tiles and secretly decides to discard one and out prices on the other two. Everyone gets a chance to buy one tile and any tiles that aren't purchased, the person who put them on the market buys them. I definitely like this. It creates a lot of interaction but it's a kind, gentle interact.
At the every round, there's some scoring. And here's where Isle gets all cute. There are several different scoring tiles, each one showing a different way to get points. And you only use about a quarter of them in any given game. So every game, there's a different way to get points and it will be in a different order for when you use the tiles. That adds a lot of replay value and means that you are always looking for something different in how you build your little map of tiles.
After just one game, I am definitely no kind of expert at either how to play or what the game structure is really like. I do know that I had fun.
Isle of Skye seems to blend the German Family ideas of heavy interactions and intuitive rules with Euro point salad. It feels like the kind of game that should be a good family game but still has enough meat to make more serious gamers respect it and enjoy it.
Frankly, if I had a regular group at the moment, I would seriously think about picking it up. Although, if I did have a regular group, somebody would've already picked it up by now.
No comments:
Post a Comment