Palm Island is a solitaire game with one of the most clever gimmicks – I use that term with endearment – I’ve seen in a while: You hold the entire game in your hand, hence the name “Palm Island.” It manages to sneak in some resource management and ‘building’ concepts while forcing choices by setting up the cards so you can’t do everything you want to do. You’ll cycle through a small deck of cards eight times, trying to gain as many points as possible by using the cards with resources on them to upgrade the cards worth victory points.
The base game comprises a deck of 17 cards, one of which is just the round marker, while the others are double-sided and have different abilities depending on which side is pointing up. After shuffling the other 16, all in their starting orientation, you look at the top two cards and choose your actions. You can rotate some cards 90 degrees clockwise to make a resource (fish, wood, stone) available, often for free but sometimes at the cost of other resources. When you use a resource card to pay for something else, you rotate it back 90 degrees counterclockwise. You may also spend resources to turn some cards 180 degrees, unlocking more powerful abilities/more resources/more points, or to flip them over, unlocking even more of the same. The base deck has two housing cards that you can upgrade three times (turn 180, flip over, turn 180 again) to get to 6 victory points, and two temples that you can upgrade three times to get to 10 victory points, but I don’t think it’s possible to hit all four of those maximum figures with the original deck, and the order in which those cards appear affects your ideal strategy.
There are a handful (pun intended) of other restrictions on how you use these cards. You can only have four resource cards rotated to the right at any time; to rotate a fifth one you must discard one of the others by rotating it counterclockwise back into place. When you rotate a card 90 degrees to make its resource(s) available, you place it at the back of the deck; if that card returns to the top before you’ve used it, you lose that resource, rotating the card back 90 degrees counterclockwise and also placing it at the back of the deck. You can keep the top card in place and keep using or discarding (to the back) the second card, but once you reach the round marker card, you have to use or discard that top card as well – you can’t roll it over into the next round.
Some of the resource cards can be worth points if fully upgraded as well, although it can be at the cost of some of its resource powers – the Logger cards, which give you one wood at the start and two wood if upgraded twice, are worth five points if upgraded all three times but don’t give you any wood in that state. You have to upgrade at least some of the resource cards to be able to max out the housing or temple cards, the latter of which requires eleven total resources to go from its 2x state to its 3x state. This combination of features means you have to make a series of choices that will be determined by the order of the cards in the deck. The rules say you can look through the entire deck once before you start, but once you’ve started you can only look at the top three cards.
The game comes with Feat cards you can gain by hitting certain milestones in your games, starting with scoring 30 points, which I did in my first game and do almost every game now, up to some more difficult goals – it took me several plays and a bit of luck with card order to finally hit 40 points – or more specific ones, like upgrading all your Logger cards three times. Those Feat cards are nearly always useful, some more than others, but getting them at the wrong time can mess with your card sequencing.
There are two base decks in the game, so you can play competitively or cooperatively with someone else, although it’s a bit of a kludge for a game that was clearly designed with the solo player in mind. I’ve timed myself and none of my games has taken more than 13 minutes to play. For a novel solo experience it’s worth the price, maybe not as clever or challenging as my favorite solo game, Coffee Roaster, but cheaper and much more portable.
General question about solitaire style games, I always think “I would buy that if it was a phone app” but don’t see the appeal of playing a physical solitaire game. (Unlike other board games where you sit around a table with friends and the physical moving of the pieces, etc., is part of the experience). For example, I would never grab a deck of cards and play solitaire at this point.
Is there anything I’m missing on these?
It gets you off your screen(s). There’s so much evidence that our screen time is bad for our brains, and the blue light in particular is bad for our sleep patterns. Physical solitaire games avoid that. Palm Island is also as portable as a phone, so unlike Coffee Roaster, you can play it anywhere.
Thanks for the reply, all the best to you for the holidays Keith!