Nautilus Island is a simple family-friendly game that first appeared at Gen Con this past August, combining set collection with a tiny bit of press-your-luck that’s great for younger gamers but that I found too simple for my own tastes.
In Nautilus Island, players will try to collect sets of treasure cards from the board, which represents a shipwreck and has stacks of cards aligned in rows, with some stacks face-up and others face-down. On your turn, you’ll move your Castaway meeple to the other side of the board, next to any row except the one you just left. Once there, you may either take the top card from every stack in that row, or play a number of cards from your hand, all of one color, equal to the number of stacks in your row (one to three). If there’s an active bonus token available for that card color, you can claim it. You then have the choice to ‘close’ your set, which precludes you from playing any more cards of that color for the rest of the game (although you may take them), at which point you take the most valuable Porthole token left for the number of cards in that set. For example, if you have four blue cards in your set, and you close it before anyone else has closed a four-card set, you’ll get the Porthole token worth 8 points. Those tokens decline in value as more players claim them. There are six different colors of cards, five of which you can collect in sets plus the yellow treasure cards that are just worth straight victory points. Once players have exhausted the stacks in any row of the board, the game ends, and players add up the points from their bonus tokens, Porthole tokens, and any treasure cards to determine the winner.
There isn’t that much strategy in Nautilus Island other than the turn order aspect of where you place your meeples. The number of stacks varies by player count, but the board always has at least one stack alone in a row at the front of the boat, and at least one row of three stacks at the back. After a round, when all players have placed their meeples on one side of the boat, the new turn order is determined by who’s closest to the front of the boat – so if you moved to the one-stack row at the very front, you had a less powerful move (take or play just one card), but you go first in the next round, which might line you up to get cards you really wanted. Beyond that, however, you’re just collecting cards, and eventually have to decide how much to push your luck around closing sets, because you only score for sets you’ve closed and for which you’ve claimed a Porthole token – once all tokens for a set size are claimed, future sets of that size are worthless.
The game was co-designed by Théo Rivière and Johannes Goupy, who also co-designed last year’s Rauha and have contributed to the designs of Sea Salt & Paper, Orichalcum (still on my Shelf of Shame), and Draftosaurus, so they’ve got some pretty strong designs under their belts. This feels a bit like a throwaway design, though; my seven-year-old nephew loves it, and that’s worth something, but I’ve played this with adults and we all thought it was too light. Your best option on each turn is pretty obvious, and when to close a set isn’t that hard a decision if you’re old enough to figure out how many cards of each color might still be left in the stacks. You can play a complete game inside of 20 minutes with two or three players – I haven’t played with four but I can’t imagine it would run longer than about 25 with that player count. I’d recommend this if you have younger kids who want to join the big people at the game table but are between games strictly for kids and those for older or more experienced players, but that’s a narrow window.