My Island

• Designer: Reiner Knizia
• Publisher: Kosmos
• Players 2-4
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes per game, 24 games in the campaign
• Played with copy provided by Thames&Kosmos
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3vHYBa3

After a long journey you have arrived on a mysterious island. You build the first houses, create fields and paths through the jungle, and advance further and further inland. 

My Island is a legacy game. This means that your game changes and evolves as you play it. Everyone has their own island, which they redesign in each game. Three games together form a chapter. And for each chapter there is a sealed envelope containing new rules and various materials with which you can change your playing surface again and again. Experience the history of your island and discover its secrets in 24 fascinating games.

Each player gets their own player board (identical except for an animal icon) and a set of 28 tiles.  The deck of cards, one card per tile, is shuffled.  In general, a card will be flipped up from the deck each round, and all players find the matching tile and place it on their board.  The first tile must be placed so that it covers at least one beach space, then each successive tile must be placed so that one of its sides is adjacent to a matching symbol.  You start the game on the 10 space of the scoring track, and it’s important to remember that you score a point each time you place a house on a beach space.  

You can choose to skip placing a tile, though you lose a point on your scoring track.  At any point in the round, you can state that you are ending your participation and simply stop placing tiles. There is no penalty for this voluntary withdrawal from the round.

Each episode will have new rules – there are 8 envelopes in the game and you will be instructed to open them in 3 game intervals.  For spoilery reasons, I’ll not divulge the additions to the basic game, but you can be fairly certain that the rules for the three games will be related.  There is a helpful small summary sheet included in each envelope so that all players can quickly see the rules changes and the scoring rubric for those three episodes.   The rules even recommend playing the three games of the episode in a single sitting (as they are related).

The episode ends when the final card is flipped up from the deck OR when all players have voluntarily quit the episode.  All players now lose a point for each beach space still visible on the board. Then, players will compare their scores.  

The player with the most points will fill in 2 progress circles at the very top of the board (these are essentially end game VPs).  The player with second most points will fill in one progress circle.  Depending on the rules in those secret envelopes, there will also be other ways to fill in those progress circles, but you’ll have to wait until you play those games to find out how!

Those magic envelopes also come with stickers and other instructions.  Depending on your order of finish, you might get stickers to place permanently on your board or instructions on things to draw onto it.

My thoughts on the game

Well, we were pretty excited for this one after our experience with My City – Herr Knizia’s previous foray into the legacy arena.   My City will always hold a special place in my heart as we managed to play the game completely over Zoom, with me mailing pieces around the country each week so that we could all update our boards and pieces as needed.

My Island is much of the same, having the same overall framework.  In each chapter, you open an envelope to get the rules and pieces required for your next three games.  Each of the games is fairly short (20 to 30 minutes) and they all tend to be variations on a theme.  The big difference here (for me) is that the pieces are hexagonal in nature as opposed to square.  This leads to a lot more adjacencies between pieces and more options on where to put things.

I’d definitely recommend committing to a few chapters before making up your mind.  For me, the first two chapters (6 games) were pretty simple – almost too simple. And, there was definitely grumbling in the game group as to whether we should continue or not.  The later chapters do feel a bit more interesting, but you have to make it through those introductory chapters to get there…  

Each of the games were fine, and I honestly kind of liked the fact that the length of each was short.  (As I’m writing this, we’re working our way through Ticket to Ride Legacy, and let’s just say that some of those games are ending up way longer than I’d like…).  However, unlike TTR Legacy and other legacy games I’ve enjoyed – My Island doesn’t have much of an overriding theme nor a longitudinal quest or scoring goal.  Just try to do as best you can in each game, and cross off the legacy VPs on your board as you do so.  Yes, that simplifies it a bit… but My Island really just feels like 24 short games played upon each other, each with a single rule change to differentiate it from the previous one.

And, I’m also oversimplifying the changes.  There are certainly some chapters where there are a lot of rules changes. Unfortunately for me, there isn’t an updated ruleset that comes with it, just a little page of new rules – and I will admit that I had a hard time keeping track of all the rules, especially when you get a lot of changes – and possibly we have taken a week or two off between sessions.  This is one occasion where I’d definitely have preferred a rulebook where you added stickers with changes so that you had a unifying document to refer to each time you started playing.

In the end, My Island was a game where I was never unhappy to play a game and never had a bad experience along the way.  The games were… fine.  But, there was also never anything really compelling about the overall campaign – this was not a game that was pulling me to play it every week or to suggest a second envelope in any given game session.  (In part, that’s the reason why the review waited until February to be written).  In a strict sense, it’s a Legacy game because the board and components are permanently altered as you go; but in another sense, it is barely a campaign – it’s just 8 chapters of 3 games each that share a basic structure/rule set.  There was never a feeling of anticipation about what might come next – we already knew – it would be some small rules changes to make it just a little different from last time.

My love for My City may  have been due in part to the extraordinary situation in which we played it – that was not replicated here for My Island, and as a result, my feelings for My Island are not as positive as with My City.  A lot of it felt like I had already seen it all before, this time with hexes instead of squares.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I wish the two games were more different.  If you haven’t played either of them, I’d recommend either for a short campaign (of sorts) if you have a group that is stable enough for 8 sessions.

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3vHYBa3

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Mitchell: I didn’t find the game that engaging. It was fine for a half dozen episodes, but then it just seemed like more of the same. We just gave up on it. My main issue is that it’s not sufficiently interactive.

Dan B. (full campaign): I agree it’s a lot like My City, but My Island gets quite a bit more complex than My City ever did, with some games having many important competing goals to work on. So the experience ultimately felt different to me in meaningful ways. (I still enjoy My City, which does have the advantage of playing faster.) As for interaction, it’s definitely low at the start but does increase later on; obviously I can’t say more without spoiling things.

My only significant issue with the game is that it doesn’t do nearly as good a job as My City did of explaining which placement rules and which scoring opportunities were available in each game; in My Island there are more rules which apply for only one or a few games and it’s not always clear when they stop applying. Kosmos is supposed to release a FAQ at some point addressing the issues, so if you are interested in the game I would advise waiting until it is available before playing.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dan B., Steph H
• I like it. Dale (any individual game)
• Neutral. Dale (the overall “campaign”), Mitchell
• Not for me…