Robinson Crusoe: AotCI Take 2

Our first foray into the Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island board game was not so successful. Actually our first several attempts went rather poorly and a few of them didn’t even make it past a few turns before we decided to restart. There was one particular game where we seemed to be cursed with horrible bad luck and by the 3rd turn we had every wood source around us exhausted.  That is pretty terrible when you have to generate a huge pile of wood in a short amount of time.

Luck was on our side today, however, and we were able to overcome the first scenario and get rescued by a passing ship. Sure we may have had terrible morale due to Keen’s character complaining about his hunger, and I had some kind of gnarly spiderbite on my head, but the point is we survived!  Sure, we worked our friend Friday to death and nearly starved, but the point is we stockpiled enough wood to signal a passing ship.  Most likely we’re both going to die on that boat ride  back home anyway, but hey, there’s no scenario for that so who cares?

We peeked ahead at some of the other scenarios and got pretty excited about what is in store for us. Future adventures have you trekking the island and exorcising evil, exploring for treasure Indiana Jones style, taking out cannibal tribes, etc. They included a lot of really cool scenario cards with specialized rules and objectives. Some of them are a lot more complicated than our quest to build a pile of wood. If we could barely accomplish that then these next adventures are going to be brutal.

  • I really enjoy Robinson Crusoe. It takes everything I like about resource-management games and combines it with co-operative play. Plus it’s got a great theme.

    You guys should check out some of the free downloadable scenarios they have for the game too. One of them has the players acting as members of Darwin’s expedition to catalog all the flora and fauna of the galpagos. The second one – and my favorite one – has you playing as the film crew for the original King Kong movie and you have to get production done on time. It’s really brilliant.

  • Greav mentioned the King Kong one. I think they all sound fun. I’m hoping we get to the Swiss Family Robinson themed one where we have to build a treehouse or something.

    Still, I find myself wondering why this is called “Robinson Crusoe” when there’s everything BUT Robinson Crusoe.

  • Thanks for these board game reviews Graev, you sparked my interest in Mice and Mystics and this and I’ve ended up buying them both. They’ve been great fun so far.

    Finished my first play-through of this with a friend last night. Well, I say first, it was actually our second attempt at the first scenario because our initial foray into the world of desert island survival went horribly wrong in pretty much every way possible. We JUST managed to survive and build the fire but it was a close run thing and we had some pretty good fortune with the weather rolls towards the end. Look forwarding to trying the other scenarios out.

  • I have robinson crusoe and I just find it too much. too many rules and slow paced. It makes your brain hurt a bit. Perhaps I had a partner who was not into it which made me not want to continue either but i tried it solo and felt the same pains. It’s a great game for those who like a difficult to learn and play game. It does have great theme and a great game overall but I suspect more niche audience for this.

    However, I played Lord of the Rings card game LCG. This is a great single or 2 player game. Of course it is a money sink so be prepared as you will want to build decks to beat other scenarios but I got to say it hooks you. The scenarios come with a story arc that get progressively harder and you need to really build your deck properly to have a chance to win the harder scenarios. Graev look into this one, I think it’s better than your pathfinder game. There is a ton of expansion packs so choose wisely or you can go broke quickly.

  • We played the first scenario yesterday for the first time and it was a lot of fun. We had 4 people and for a while had a good run of luck…some rounds looked pretty bleak but overall we lit the pile of wood in the 10th round. As usual, we got some of the rules wrong but corrected them mid game…I think we still would have made it if we had played it as we should have but maybe we would have been delayed by a round. It sucked when we were forced to move out mountain camp and we lost our roof and palisades,,,grr…also noticed that it was pretty nice to have a good weapon strength…it made things a lot easier…all those encounters with beasts became pretty beneficial to us.