Survive the Island Board Game Review

Over the past few months, my family has been really excited about games that are easy to learn and relatively quick to play. Survive the Island is that game to a T – easy to learn, quick to teach, and relatively quick to play. There isn’t a ton going on in this experience, which might hurt the long term appeal of the game, but it’s a great title to bust out now and then to offset longer, deeper experiences.

In Survive the Island, players are trying to get their survivors off the central island and to the various corner islands in order to score points. Points are scored based on the number on the bottom of the saved characters, which number from 1 to 5. Monsters will appear on the board throughout the game, and players will move these monsters to their advantage, trying to destroy your opponents rafts, eat their survivors, and hinder them from scoring maximum points.

I love how easy it is to play this game. Your turn starts by taking 3 points of movement. You can move one survivor multiple spaces along land or water, move a raft that you control (have at least as many survivors in the raft as opponents), or move an empty raft. During this phase, you can also use a bonus printed on tiles you get when the water rises.

And that brings us to the second step, rising water. As the water rises around the island, players will need to remove tiles that were placed during setup. There are three “levels” of tiles that are differentiated by the thickness of the cardboard. The beach tiles, the thinnest tiles, are removed first, before the jungle tiles and finally the volcanic rock tiles.

When a tile is removed, the player looks at the bottom – red border tiles are resolved instantly, usually resulting in a new monster being placed on the board, or some other negative effect happening – or a green border, which provides players a bonus action they can take. These range from providing additional movement to deflecting monster attacks.

The final phase is moving the monsters. There are three monsters in the game, all of which act in different ways. The sea serpent destroys rafts and kills survivors. The sharks can’t hurt rafts, but can eat survivors who are swimming. The godzilla-like creatures can destroy rafts, but only displaces survivors to surrounding tiles. Deciding how to move these monsters on your turn – depending on which monster you roll – is a huge strategic decision as it can make the difference between winning and losing.

And that’s the bulk of it – Survive the Island is that basic of a game. When three volcanoes are flipped over, or when there are no more survivors left to save, the game ends. The player with the most points under their saved survivors wins the game.

This is a very basic game with a really nice production. You can read our production opinions here , so we won’t get into that too much. But let’s talk about the experience. Ultimately, Survive the Island is fun, and my 10 year old son Lochlan really enjoyed playing the game. If it wasn’t for his major enjoyment of what we played, Survive the Island might be a title that doesn’t stick around as long as other games in our collection.

My wife and I thought it was fine, fun for what it was. And with a limited number of games to play on our latest camping trip, it got tabled quite a bit. But back at home, we have a few games we would rather play than this. That doesn’t make Survive the Island a bad game, just not one we prefer.

For newer board game players, or those looking for a filler game for their weekly game night, I think Survive the Island could fit that mold, at least for a few months. It might be a game you pick up and move on from, but we do say it’s worth getting.