My Island Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review My Island, a legacy style game published by Thames and Kosmos. My Island is the follow up to the successful My City and Chris lets you know how it plays.

Have you ever wanted to experience the rush of exploring an uncharted island that—depending on how you interpret the flimsy narrative of the game—has either been inhabited, then forgotten multiple times over the course of hundreds of years or never before touched by human hands? Have you ever wanted to take that theme and play a game based on it 24 consecutive times with almost no interesting changes to the ruleset or goals?

Yeah, me neither. But here we go anyway.

My Island is a competitive(ish) and legacy(ish) game for 2 to 4 players designed by Reiner Knizia. It lasts 24 games spread across 8 “themed” Chapters and each Episode plays in just about a half hour. While not resettable, the game technically can be played forever at the conclusion of the campaign.

My Island is a tile-laying legacy game in which players will all use the same shaped tile each turn and add it to their (potentially) unique island grid. Scoring varies depending on the Chapter players are on, but for the most part, it involves clustering like terrain types together or making paths from one point to another. Winning each individual game (an “Episode” in the game’s parlance) offers a reward that will help a player win the long-term legacy game itself.

The rules at their most basic are standard tile stuff—certain spaces need to be covered, tiles need to be placed adjacently to like terrain, etc.—but get more involved and complicated as the campaign progresses. Well… they kinda do; more on that later.

The structure of My Island overall is that there are 8 Chapters, each divided into 3