It’s hard being Robinson Crusoe

Life sure isn’t easy on a deserted island.

In fact, most of the time it can downright stink.

But that isn’t to say there aren’t pleasures to be found.

Such is the case with the Robinson Crusoe 2nd edition board game from Portal Games.

It’s one of the hardest cooperative board games we’ve played. Yet it’s filled with so much adventuring theme and tough decisions, that we keep thinking about it long after we’ve played.

It may seem like we’re on a deserted island kick this week because our last review, Hellapagos, is also a cooperative game with a deserted island theme. However, the two games are vastly different. Hellapagos is a quick game with social interaction where players are voted to perish or not fit on the escape rafts. While Robinson Crusoe is a deeper and longer adventure to explore, gather resources, make shelters, fight off beasts, withstand the bad weather, and generally survive multiple different scenarios. And it can be played solo or with 3 other friends or family.

If the theme of surviving on an island full of peril strikes your fancy, read on!

 

Robinson Crusoe board game background

Robinson Crusoe was first published in 2012 and quickly rose in popularity among the board game community. The fact that it was a cooperative board game with an adventure theme immediately caught my attention and I looked forward to getting a shot at it one day.

Another factor that played in to wanting to play it was hearing everyone that had played it talk about how crazy-difficult the game was to win. That sounded like a great challenge!

Then I heard Portal Games was going to publish a revised 2nd edition of the game with a revised rule book and game flow. So I decided to hold off for the new version.

Well, that day finally game!

And now it’s time to share our thoughts.

 

How to play Robinson Crusoe

Playing a game of Robinson Crusoe is an epic adventure in and of itself – in that it takes a couple hours to play.

And like many games that take 2 or more hours to play, explaining how to play Robinson Crusoe in detail also takes a long time. To give you an idea, Rodney Smith of “Watch it Played” does a fantastic job of explaining the various aspects of the game and the video 45 minutes long! So if you want the full rundown, check out his Robinson Crusoe How to Play video.

Rather than cover the whole 40-page rulebook, I’m just going to give you a quick overview of the game play.

In Robinson Crusoe, players are working together to try to survive and complete their chosen scenario. The game comes with 7 different scenarios — each with it’s own alterations and goals.

Each player chooses a Character which will give them different skill sets to contribute to the team’s success.

The game is played over a series of rounds that are each broken into 6 phases:

Event Phase: Players begin the round by turning over the top Event card and resolving it. (Yes, this will mostly not be good.)

Morale Phase: Players check to see where the marker is on the Morale track. If it’s positive, the starting player gets the indicated amount of Determination tokens. If it’s negative, they must discard Determination tokens.

Production Phase: Location tiles have different resource icons on them that players may collect during this phase of the round if their camp is located there.

Action Phase: This is divided into 2 steps — Planning and Resolving. Players plan by placing their 2 worker discs on different areas of the board depending on what they want to accomplish. Players work together in planning who will go where. Some actions have guaranteed success if two discs are assigned to that action. Players could try to combat Threats, fight Beasts (for fur and food), build Shelters, build Inventions, gather Resources, explore new Regions, arrange camp, or rest. Once all discs are placed, actions are Resolved in left-to-right order (as shown at the bottom of the game board).

Weather Phase: During this phase, players roll the specified Weather dice (orange, red, white) according to the scenario. And if tokens have been placed in the Weather space, those are resolved as well. This is where having roofs on your shelters is very helpful.

Night Phase: During the Night phase, players can heal their wounds and must eat. If not enough food is available, some players will take wounds. Players can also choose to move their camp to an adjacent tile during this phase.

Players win if they complete the scenario objective before the specified number of rounds. Players lose if the don’t complete the objective by then or if one of the characters dies along the way.

That’s the very condensed version of how to play the game.

Obviously there are more rules involved with each phase and each action carries its own risks and rewards.

 

Can the whole family enjoy Robinson Crusoe

It might go without saying that Robinson Crusoe isn’t meant for young players. So it doesn’t fall into our “family board game” category. Instead, it’s a teens and adults kind of game — mainly due to the amount of components, rules, and length.

And even if they’re old enough, just like being stuck on a deserted island, not everyone is going to find enjoyment in the game.

It’s a pretty tough game to win because so many bad things happen along the way and it can be tough to get and keep the resources you need to survive.

But if you’re up for the challenge, the Robinson Crusoe adventure awaits!

There are some pretty cool aspects of the game that we really like.

First of all is that there are plenty of choices to make. It’s fun trying different things and seeing how they affect the game.

Second is how every game plays out a different narrative. Even when playing the same scenario, the game will take it’s own story line because of the randomness inherent in the game. There are multiple decks with tons of cards that will bring out different events and effects each game. Sometimes you’ll have bad run-ins with wildlife and other times you might have a run of bad luck with building things.

Also, while there aren’t a ton of different island tiles, exploring new areas is an adventure because you don’t know what type of tile (and thus resources available) will come up next.

Then there’s the impact that the random dice rolls have on your turns. Placing two discs on an action may guarantee success, but it also means you’re taking less actions in a round. And when more actions means more potential resources, those can be hard to sacrifice.

Which brings us to another point we enjoy. Some cards have carry-over effects. This means that some actions that occur will have related consequences pop up later. You can each some mushrooms now, but that might also mean people getting sick later. Or if you get a wound while building a shelter, you may get an infection later. All of these types of events help immerse players in the theme of the game.

Lastly, we like that there isn’t an alpha-gamer problem with the game. If you haven’t heard that term before, it refers to one player taking control and telling everyone else what to do on their turns in a cooperative board game.

We haven’t found that to be an issue at all in Robinson Crusoe. There’s plenty of discussion throughout the game. But because of all the random things occurring, it’s not like there’s a puzzle to solve. Everyone collaborates to find ways to survive together.

If those sound like great qualities in a cooperative board game for you, then go ahead and give Robinson Crusoe a try.

 

 

Keeping it Organized

As you can tell from the description and photos, there are a ton of components in Robinson Crusoe.

If you’re still wondering that then just take a look at the back of the rule book — where it summarizes all the symbols you may encounter while playing the game.

And games like this are the perfect kind of games for a slick game insert to keep it all organized. That’s where our friends, Insert Here, shine.

They’ve created a game insert for Robinson Crusoe that we love!

Rather than stuffing everything in baggies and then sorting them out, the Insert Here foam core game organizer keeps everything stored nicely so there isn’t any sorting at all when it comes time to play.

And a number of the components never even need to leave the insert. Simply pull out the trays and set them next to the game board. Yes, you’ll want to pull out the different decks to place on their spot on the game board, but they all have their own spot in the insert so it’s super easy to set up and take down the game.

We store most of our games on their side on our game shelves, so having inserts that keep all the components from shifting around is something we love. The Insert Here game insert for Robinson Crusoe has that covered. Everything stays nicely in its place.

If you’re going to buy a copy of Robinson Crusoe, we highly recommend you also buy the Robinson Crusoe game organizer from Insert Here.

We’d like to thank Miniature Market for a review copy of Robinson Crusoe as well as Insert Here for a review copy of the game insert.