Isla Dorada is an auction, card-drafting and group-point-to-point movement game by Bruno Faidutti, about a group of explorers who are treasure-hunting on a Jules Verne-esque mysterious island.
Components
This is a fairly lavish production, and all the components are well made. The board depicts the “mysterious island” with a series of archeological sites linked together in a novel form of network by different types of connections (desert roads, mountain roads, jungle roads, and waterways); players need different types of transport for each type of connection, and the river connections move in only one direction; the game involves a lot of looking for particular sites, so I appreciated that the name of each site is printed bi-directionally on the board. There 3 pawns in the game, 1 expedition pawn which all players bid to control the movement of, and 2 monster pawns (bigfoot and leviathan) which are used to block particular connections between sites. The pawns are large, detailed white plastic sculptures, similar to those in Cyclades. There are several decks of cards: adventure cards (used for bidding and special powers), oracle cards (end game bonuses), treasure cards (in game victory points), and curses (in game victory point losses). The cards are of good quality. The artwork is in a detailed, caricaturish style. It is good artwork, but it makes the cards a little “busy” aesthetically. I would have preferred if the card art on the treasures and oracle cards included maps of the locations they referred to, but this is a minor point. I will talk about the controversial content of some of the artwork in the Game Design section of the review. There are also sets of simple wooden disks and cardboard tokens in the game, all of good quality, looks, and functionality.
Setup
The 16 wooden “exploration markers” are placed on the exploration track along the top of the game board; this serves as the game timer. The expedition pawn always begins the game on the “zeppelin crash site” space in the center of the board. Each player is dealt 3 starting treasure cards - keeping 2, 2 oracle cards - keeping 1, and 1 curse card. Each player is dealt 6 adventure cards, discarding and redrawing any cards with a bolt symbol (immediate effect cards) in their starting hand. A row of 4 face up adventure cards is laid out beside the adventure deck. Each player gets 10 gold, and has to make this last the entirety of the game.
Gameplay
Each turn, starting with the winner of the previous turn’s auction (the expedition leader), players bid for the power to decide which path the expedition will move along that turn. The active player places the expedition pawn on a path, and call out their bid. When bidding players simply call out a number, or pass, but do not display the cards they plan to cover their bids with (players may not make bids they cannot cover). A player who passes is allowed to re-enter the bidding later. The round of bidding normally ends when all players pass after one player bids. The flow of the auction can be effected by special adventure cards, such as the “Ovetos” which can end the bidding early or the “Juju” card which can stop a particular player from continuing to bid.
At the conclusion of the bid, the new expedition leader must pay for her bid with adventure cards. Each kind of path has a particular card used to pay for bids to move along it. The paths and the cards which correspond to them are color-coded. The cards for Jungle, Desert, and Mountain paths are all worth 1 towards your bid. Kayak and Draco cards are worth 2, Zeppelin cards are worth 5. Draco and Zeppelin cards also consume gold when they are used to cover a bid. Only the expedition leader must pay cards to cover her bid.
The expedition pawn then moves. Normally it moves to the next site along the path chosen by the expedition leader. When moving down rivers, the pawn must follow the direction of the river but may travel more than 1 link. If a player covers her bid entirely with air travel cards (Draco and/or Zeppelin cards), she may move the pawn to any site on the board. This in particular makes it important for players to track each other’s assets and apparent intent from bid to bid. The “Sangaia” adventure card can also be used to make the pawn overshoot its normal destination site.
Once the pawn has arrived at its final destination for the turn, one of the exploration markers is removed from the exploration track, and placed on the current explorer pawn site, to mark that site as having been explored (doubling back over sites causes them to pick up extra exploration markers and reduces the total number of sites that will get explored during the game). Players reveal all treasure and curse cards which list the current pawn site, and keep them face up for the rest of the game. Players may be able to play matching bonus adventure cards along with their treasures for extra points. When the 4th and 5th expedition markers are placed on the board, players get additional treasure cards to attempt to fulfill later in the game.
Players then draw adventure cards, left from the current expedition leader. Players always draw 1 adventure card, and then may choose to draw a second card at a cost of 1 gold. Cards may be drawn either from the 4 face up cards, or the face down deck. Adventure cards with a bolt symbol in the upper-right corner all have a effect which is executed immediately when the card is picked up. These effects are all to the benefit of the player who took the card, or to the detriment of other players, and are all familiar sorts of effects (gain a treasure card, move the blocking pawns, make other players loose adventure cards, etc.). All players having drawn, the next auction begins.
Game End and Winning
The game ends when the 16th exploration marker is placed on the board. Players loose victory points for any face-up curses they possess. The gain victory points for face up treasures, bonus adventure cards, and for fulfilling the condition(s) of their oracle card. The oracle cards have a wide variety of conditions, but most involve certain sites being explored by the end of the game. Players also get 1 victory point per gold they retain at the end of the game.
Game Design
This is a classic Faidutti design, retaining the characteristic feel of his games while having a good measure of original elements. Bidding to control the entire group of player’s movement is reminiscent of Faidutti’s earlier game Silk Road, although it is a much more complex element in this game. The emphasis on fulfilling secret scoring conditions is also a staple of previous Faidutti designs such as Mission Red Planet, and Letter of Marque, although it is a bigger part of this game than any of his previous designs. These two elements harmonize in a unique way in Isla Dorada, to create an auction with some rich and original psychological aspects, and these keep the game interesting and strategic even in the face of some strong random elements. For example, a player can outbid a previous player and choose the same route the previous player chose. The first player to bid on the route must decide if the new player is trying to be first to pick up a particular card, or if the new player is going to use air travel and pick an entirely different destination. Thus when other players see you pick up air travel cards, they become wary of letting you win the auction; which is bad if you want to win cheaply, but good if you want get other players to outbid you on choices you do not care about. Tracking face-up draws by other players is certainly worthwhile if you feel like making the effort. Most of the decision points in the game involve psyching out or being psyched out by your opponents.
There is a fair amount of randomness in Isla Dorada, but not as much as you might think at first glance. The various card drafts help mitigate a lot of the randomness. The treasures and curse cards vary in worth a great deal, but this is balanced by the likelihood of the expedition traveling to different locations based on the number of routes there, the amount of demand for the site on different cards, etc. I found it was not uncommon to draw treasure and curse cards for the same locations in the game, giving me an interesting risk-reward choice. There are a couple of random elements that probably should have been weaker. Getting extra treasures or having un-scored treasures stolen can create a pretty big swing in points based almost purely on luck. Still, even that randomness is consistent with the kind of game Faidutti clearly wanted to make here.
I would say that Faidutti has succeeded in doing what he set out to do with Isla Dorada. While he hasn’t created a design that is radically different for him, he has created a game that stands out against most of the current crop of Eurogames. It is somewhat more chaotic than most games this year, but also more redolent of theme and more fun. It is more psychological, and less calculable. If you commonly like Faidutti’s games, you’re almost certain to love this one. If you hate luck and bluffing in games, you may not like Isla Dorada. If you are somewhere in between, I strongly encourage you to at least give it a try. In a year full of challenging but dry games like The Speicherstadt (or even my own Armorica) Isla Dorada is a refreshing change of pace; like a tropical fruit flavored sorbet after a filling but salty ham...and speaking of tropical...
A brief note on the previously alluded to controversial content of the artwork. Some of the cards depict stereotypical caricatures of dark-skinned “natives.” From reading about the game on Faidutti’s website, the artwork for these in the American edition of the game is somewhat toned-down in various ways. However, there is no getting around the fact that this artwork is going to offend some people and I certainly can’t say they would be wrong for being offended. Overall, the game does a very good job of evoking its theme in a comical way, and I can see an argument for the controversial artwork being integral to realizing the theme. I think that with a little more creativity, this could have been a game whose artwork and content actually parodied the imagery of colonialism, instead of just trying to find humor in it. This production doesn’t achieve that level of discourse, but to be fair, social commentary is a lot to ask of a board game. Fortunately for Faidutti, the vast majority of gamers will just care that the game itself is quite good.
