I’ve got a mixed take on Stefan Feld’s “point salad” games. The Castles of Burgundy is one of my favorite games ever, probably my favorite heavy (or heavier, depending on your perspective) game. Bora Bora is a shade heavier, and pretty good, although I have to be in the right mood for it. His last two games have left me cold, however. Merlin was a total mess where it took a lot of work to get tiny gains in points. Carpe Diem was somewhat better but still not good, with at least one scoring method too many and a tile-selection mechanic that makes it way too easy to end up stuck.
La Isla isn’t his newest, but it’s probably his least-known title, and I don’t see any good reason for that. It’s not a point-salad game, really; there are only a few ways to score and they are all connected, logically and thematically. The game also features a lot of simultaneous play, so turns are very short, and you can play a whole game in under an hour. Yet it has the kind of strategic thinking I expect from Feld games, along with an extremely satisfying mechanic at the heart of the game that I find I really enjoy.
Players in La Isla are explorers trying to photograph five rare animals spread throughout the island represented by the game’s board. That board is variable, with ten interlocking pieces around a circular center piece, and both the board and the distribution of animals varies every time you play. The animals go in the green spaces around the board, and every such space is surrounded by places where players can place their explorer tokens. When a player places explorers on all spaces surrounding one animal – which can be two, three, or four spaces – they take that animal token and score for the number of explorers it took to claim it. Each player starts the game with a large, two-point token for one of the five animals.
That’s the heart of the game, but there’s more to the scoring, of course. There’s a deck of cards in La Isla that governs most of the play itself, with each card showing three things: a special ability, a resource color, and one of the five animals. Each player gets three cards on every turn and must choose one to use for its ability, one to gain the shown resource, and one to advance the shown animal on the scoring tracks. Each player has a cardholder with three spaces in it, and on each turn will place one card in one of those slots – covering existing cards from the fourth round onward – to gain that ability for as long as the card is still showing. The card selection process is simultaneous for all players, so the rounds move quickly.
To place an explorer on the board, you need to pay two resources of the matching color of the space where you want your explorer to go. (You only have five explorers, so once you’ve placed your fifth one, you start moving them, which is itself a strategic decision because you only have a few explorers to use to surround any animal token.) There are many special abilities that make this easier – you may gain a resource for where you place an explorer or the animal you take, or you may get to go on a certain type of space for one resource instead of two – making those abilities especially valuable in the early and middle parts of the game.
At the end of each round, players move up the five markers on the scoring board, one for each animal. When you move up a specific animal marker, you score one point for every animal token of that type you already have, so concentrating on one animal type has significant scoring benefits. The scoring board affects the end-game values of those same animal tokens, which start at zero but increase in value every few spaces; when the sum of the five values across all tracks reaches 7/9/11 points for 2/3/4 players, the game ends.
At end-game, the big points come. You score for each of your animal tokens based on their values on the tracks. For each set of all five animal tokens you have, you get another ten points – one of a few ways where Feld makes sure you can’t win just by going for a single animal type. And you get one point for every two resources left over.
La Isla requires you to have quite a bit of strategic planning, but you’re also always limited by the randomness of the cards. You have to have a long-term plan for what animals to go after, looking for areas of the board where you can be more efficient with your explorers and make the most use of the ability cards you have, but after a few rounds you’ll also be dependent on the resources that show up on the cards you draw. It’s easy to end up with a turn where you can’t place an explorer – it’s not ideal, and if you do that twice in a game you probably won’t win – because of that resource limitation, so planning ahead for that inevitability also becomes a strategic consideration. You’ll also want to push the animal you’re gathering up the track while trying not to push others up, although on some turns you won’t be able to move up your preferred animal at all and will have to determine which one to move that might just help their opponents the least.
There are two levels of ability cards in the game, with 120 level 1 cards and 60 more level 2 cards that introduce a bit more complexity to the game – some of which allow you to add up to two more explorers to your supply, others let you add a fourth slot for ability cards, and so on. They’re absolutely worth using but I agree with the rulebook’s suggestion that you play without them at least once to get the hang of the game itself.
Feld’s reputation for overly involved point-salad games is well-deserved, but La Isla isn’t one of them. There are only a few main ways to score – when you take an animal token, when you move up a marker on an animal’s scoring track, and at game-end for your animal tokens, so they’re all related, and require you to consider balance in your strategy. It’s also a brightly colored, visually appealing game, like Bora Bora (and definitely not like the original Castles of Burgundy), in a space where those features often get short shrift. If you’ve wanted to bump up to games a bit more complex than the family games I often recommend, but still want something good for kids 10+ and that plays in an hour or so, I would definitely suggest giving La Isla a shot.
