Treasure Island Review
Yohoho! It’s Treasure Island time and that means you’ll be wanting some treasure, I’ve no doubt. Well, there’s certainly treasure on this island, Jim lad, but you can be damn sure I won’t be telling you where it is!
I’ll give you a few hints though…
Players: 2-5
Time: 45 mins
Designer: Marc Paquien
Artist: Vincent Dutrait
Publisher: Matagot
Those of you who have read my reviews of Cryptid, or Detective… or Sherlock… or Exit… will know I love a good deduction game. A good mystery or a good puzzle. Putting together the clues to come up with a solution. It’s one of the best feelings in gaming. Treasure Island sets up a compelling mystery (where is the treasure!?) and puts a player in control of it.
Long John Silver, perhaps most famous of all literary pirates, knows where the treasure is and so you’ve locked him up. He wasn’t going to split it with you fairly after all. And now it’s every individual for themselves. Unfortunately, it’s a rather large island, and you can only dig up so much of it at a time. So you’ll be reliant on the clues that Long John… ummm… volunteers, we’ll say.
That means on certain turns of the game, the player wearing Long John’s peg leg will have to play one of their small hand of clue cards, publicly revealing that, perhaps, the treasure is north of the orange pirate. Aha! You’ll think, I’ve learnt so much! And then in Treasure Island’s show stopping feature, you’ll lean across the table and cross off that vast swathe of the map board with a marker pen.
Most board games discretise space, layering a square or hex grid over the board and that certainly makes a lot of things easier. Treasure Island doesn’t. It gives you freedom, drawing your movement across the board and by removing that extra layer of abstraction, it makes the island feel like a real space. You use a ruler to determine how far you can move, searching for the treasure involves drawing a ring around your pirate using one of the special templates. If the treasure Long John buried (by marking his personal mini map) is within that circle you’ve won the game! But of course they are painfully small and as all the orange sellers out there will tell you, they do not tessellate well.
The reason games tend to go for strict spaces rather than rulers is the ‘edge case’ issue. Players will inevitably push the distance they measure to the limit, and such games often come down to being just on the right side of those lines. Treasure Island ultimately only has one edge case in the game: when someone clips the treasure mark, and it is handled as well as it could be. Long John has to award the win if there is any doubt. Admittedly, that requires a degree of honesty from someone who should be roleplaying a pirate, but then they could just redraw their X too. I mean, don’t play games with cheats? Really, the benefits of this approach more than outweigh the issues!
Especially as it leans in hard to this feature of the game! The great wooden callipers are the stand out component, even if they are fairly fiddly and rarely used. I actually prefer the compass piece. One action any pirate can do is demand Long John gives them a compass hint, one of a small pile of tiles that tells them two directions the treasure is guaranteed not to be in. The corresponding plastic can be plopped on their personal map of the island to cross off the corresponding sections of the map. There’s a similarly large one for global clues for the main board. It is just fun to use these pieces!
Meanwhile, you’re supposed to be finding treasure. Each pirate has a limited number of actions: move a long way, move a short way and do a small search, or don’t move at all and do a big search. After each search, you’ll look up expectantly at Long John and say, “did I win?” And Long John will lean over the table frowning, quickly double check his own map. And say no. The uncomfortable truth about Treasure Island is you really are just making wild stabs in the dark to pass the time until all the clues have been given… and then you’re making stabs in a slightly smaller areas of darkness.
The disappointing thing is that there is so little actual deduction going on. Long John is literally telling you where it could be and you are literally crossing off areas of the board. But all that is doing is increasing the probability that you will stumble across it. That takes much of the joy out of winning as a pirate, and leaves your actions feeling hollow. Oh it’s not here either? Well, that’s a surprise.
On the other hand, the probabilities have been carefully considered. I’ve not had a game that hasn’t gone down to the wire, the climax starting when Long John escapes from captivity. But he doesn’t immediately win, he must move to the treasure, creating a desperate race between pirates and captain. It is tense, like any throw of the dice. But it is more tense for Long John, who has everything to lose. Indeed, Long John tends to have the most fun. Before escaping, he will gleefully choose clues that reveal the absolute bare minimum of information, and worse! He may even be lying.
With each clue, Long John also places a seal which, on its back, will either show a tick (it’s true!) or a question mark (it’s maybe not true!) As an action, a player can check one of those tokens. While he only gets two question marks, you can expect them to be used on the most information dense clues to ensure you have no idea what is going on. Even the puzzle is better for Long John, as they juggle what each pirate has been told.
Even though everyone is ostensibly competing, the asymmetry definitely makes the pirates feel like Long John is the greater opponent and so there is a definite air of conspiracy. When it gets close to the end, players will be tempted to share their private knowledge, which then feels awful as Long John. They are supposed to be competing, damnit!
I do feel frustrated by the mechanics of Treasure Island. I wanted a puzzle and I didnt get it, and while it is common for all vs one games to be more fun for the ‘one’ Treasure Island does seem to tilt particularly far that way. However, I have to be wildly complimentary about its theme! It brilliantly evokes the book, and it very effectively captures a group of co-conspirators torn between winning the treasure for themselves and stopping their collective foe from winning their own game. Add in the spectacular components (ok, the pen colours suck, but otherwise…) and a gang of players putting on pirate accents and you have an experience that is undeniably special. Maybe not balanced, probably not fun if you only care about competing, but sometimes that doesn’t matter as much as you might think.
If you lean into the story Treasure Island wants to tell, and the setting, and the theme then you can have a great time. Lean far enough and you might be able to get it under the stated play time, though I’d be impressed. Fortunately our two hour games haven’t felt that long.
It’s fascinating. I went in expecting one thing, and come out having been reminded of the value of something entirely different.
Rating: Looong John
Our copy of Treasure Island was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can pick up a copy for £44.99 RRP from your local hobby store.
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