Mayfair MFG3509 Isle of Skye From Chieftain to King Board Game

Product Information

I’m usually pretty fast at doing this–I play a lot of games where the main mechanism is valuation–so my idea of slow might not be everyone’s.

Published in 2015, my playing group and I have already encountered and played a long list of new games. This is a game I recommend to new board gamers as a step up from Carcassonne; it builds on the mechanic of tile laying which they will have learnt and adds into it a simple auction phase in which players will assign money from their own stash to up to 2 out of 3 random tiles they draw.

It's an incredibly simple game that plays quickly and it's pretty fun to build your little settlement up, working towards the points offered by the scoring tiles drawn.

Druids is not that complicated, especially compared to Journeyman – I actually quite like the expansion, but the problem is that the Big Box outclassed it. Here’s one game that is going to strongly incentivise players to build contiguously complete regions – you get points for each completed feature on your island, and more points still for each completed mountain.I originally bought Isle of Skye because it looked similar to Castles of Mad King Ludwig, a game I enjoyed a lot but had trouble getting to the table because of its over-an-hour playtime. Join the community and come discuss games like Codenames, Wingspan, Brass, and all your other favorite games! Many people will pick up the Spiel des Jahres winners as a matter of course – they’re generally not looking for experimental design or striking innovation. It also doesn't add any more mechanics, keeping the game on the same level of complexity as the base game.

Isle of Skye, in its unassuming package, took me by surprise and is without question one of my favorite games from 2015. Playing well you can ensure you don’t overpay for what you keep and you can get the most for the tiles you do lose. I have taken the time above to explain these key mechanics because they are in my opinion what makes this game really impressive.What they don’t add, in other words, is any sense that the designers were remotely interesting in taking risks with their design.