Our Review

Island Kingdoms

Isle of Skye

From Chieftain to King

Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister have won the award „Kennerspiel des Jahres 2015“ for their game „Broom Service“. As Pfister has been very successful, too, with his game Port Royal and Pelikan was equally successful with Gulli Piratten, I was, understandably, rather curious about their new Game “Isle of Skye”.

I had the opportunity to test an early version of the game’s prototype at Spiele Kreis Wien and at that point I did like the prototype very much. But let me say now, the prototype I played then was very good already, but the finished games is much much better!

Isle of Skye – From Chieftain to King is a tile placement game for 2-5 players. The game box cover shows a guy in a kilt playing bagpipes. When you open the box you find this content: 16 Scoring tiles, 73 Landscape tiles, 5 Castle tiles, 6 Screens (only five of them are needed, on is meant for replacement purposes), 6 Discard markers (again one is intended for replacement), 1 Round marker, 1 Starting Player tile, 1 Cloth Bag and coins of different values.

Aim of the game is, as in many more games, to acquire most victory points.

The board is laid out – it is a double-sided one, one side is intended for 2-4 players, the other side for a game with 5 players. In a game of 2-4 players, six rounds are played, in a game with 5 players only five rounds are played.

The board shows four cases, marked A, B, C and D, for scoring tiles. In each game only four tiles are used; you shuffle all scoring tiles and place four randomly chosen ones on the cases on the board. The remaining 12 scoring tiles are returned to the box and are only used in the next game.

The landscape tiles show mountains, meadows and water as well as animals, buildings, barrels of whiskey and other things.

Those 16 scoring tiles show completely different scorings and values and yield victory points for all types of landscapes and animals, buildings and other items, all of them depicted on the landscape tiles. On those landscape tiles you can find, among other things, barrels of whiskey, cows, sheep, farms, light houses as well as sailing ships.

As only four of those 16 scoring tiles are used in a game you have different options for victory points in each game. And in each round of a game only certain scoring tiles are scored to that it is nearly impossible that the same combination of scoring will appear again in another game.

The Round marker is placed on case one of the round track. Each player takes a screen, a castle tile and a playing piece in his chosen color.  Each player also receives one Discard Marker and coins of value 5.

All players set up their screen and place their money and their discard marker behind this screen.

The castle tile is placed openly at some distance from the screen. You should leave enough space to add landscape tiles to the castle in the course of the game. All landscape tiles are placed into the cloth bag.

This nearly completes the preparations, you only need to determine a starting player and hand him the starting player tile.

The Starting player draws three landscape tiles from the bag and places them open-faced and exactly in front of his screen in a way that all players can clearly see those landscape tiles. Then all other players also draw three landscape tiles and place them in front of their screen. Then each player assigns  - behind the screen – his Discard marker to one of the tiles and a minimum of 1 coin to each of the other two tiles. As the screen is still placed between tiles and money or discard marker, respectively, the other players cannot discern the price for the tiles or which of the tiles cannot be bought.

When all players have finished this assigning, all players simultaneously remove their screens and thus reveal which of their tiles goes back into the cloth bag and the amount of money each of the remaining tiles will cost. All players now place the tile next to the discard marker back into the bag.

Beginning with the starting player, each player in turn can buy a landscape tile from one of the other players. When a player has decided to buy a landscape tile, he pays the amount of money that the player who still owns the tile has assigned to the tile and then takes the tile and sets it aside. The previous owner now picks up the amount of coins he had assigned to the tile.

Instead of buying a landscape tile you can pass on buying.

In each round you only have one opportunity to buy a landscape tile.

When each player has bought a landscape tile or has passed, there are still landscape tiles left with some or all players together with coins assigned to them.

Those landscape tiles must now be bought by the respective players themselves by returning the coins assigned to them to general stock.

Thus a player can acquire between 0 and 3 landscape tiles in a round.

Now all players add all landscape tiles that they acquired to their castle tile. The usual placement rules apply: Mountain next to mountain, meadow next to meadow, water next to water. Paths are the only landscape element that need not be continued. Thus you can add a meadow without path to a meadow with path.

When all players have placed their landscape tiles, a scoring is implemented. In the first round only the scoring tile on case A is used to calculate victory points. In the second round you use the scoring tile on case B, n round three you calculate points based on the tiles in cases A and C. In the following rounds, too, only certain scoring tiles can be used to calculate victory points.

At the start of a new round each player receives five money units for his income; each player who placed landscape tiles with barrels of whiskey that are connected by a path to his castle, receives one additional money unit for each barrel symbol.

Beginning with round three each player receives additional income for each player who has more victory points. This begins with 1 money unit per player in Round 3 and is raised by one money unit per player for each additional round. Therefore the player with fewest victory points usually owns most money in a round, whereby he can make the landscape he offers for sale very expensive or commands lots of money for shopping.

A few of the landscape tiles depict scrolls which, at the end of the game, also yield victory points for the symbols shown in the scrolls. When a scroll is present in a completed area (meadow, mountain or lake), this scroll is scored twice; when the area is not complete, the scroll is only scored once.

Furthermore, each player scores one VP per 5 money units at the end of the game.

The captivates players by relatively simple mechanics and game flow. All the same, it offers a lot of strategic and tactical potential and also an extremely high replay value, as the next game can be totally different from the previous one and surely will do so as other scoring tiles are in play.

Due to the simple rules the game is an excellent family game which all the same can be recommended unconditionally to all experienced and frequent players, as it offers lots of playing appeal and needs quite some tactical cleverness in order to win the game.

The high number of 16 scoring tiles out which only 4 are used for an individual game results in importance for different tiles in each game, which in turn results in completely different game play for each game and also in completely different purchase prices for the same landscape tile in different games.

The element of chance is naturally high due to the landscape tiles being randomly drawn, and yet the tactical and strategic considerations are more important for the game play.

In our games it happened very often that we played another game immediately after the first one. The time for a game, usually between 30 and 60 minutes, depending on the number of players, entices experienced players again and again to play another game instantly, due to the quality of the game.

The art by Klemens Franz is excellent and, as is the case with games illustrated by him, many elements are self-explanatory due to his graphics.

My summary: Isle of Sky can only be rated as an exceptional and excellent game, and I can only say “Alex and Andreas have delivered a worthy follow-up to their successful Broom Service and this follow-up is, in my opinion, even better than their Kennerspiel des Jahres 2015.”

Players: 2-5

Age: 8+

Time: 60+

Designer: Andreas Pelikan, Alexander Pfister

Artist: Klemens Franz

Price   ca. €. 26.-

Publisher: Lookout Spiele 2015

Web: www.lookout-spiele.de

Genre: Tile placement

Users: For families

Version: de

Rules: de en

In-game text: no

Comments:

Excellent graphic design

Simple, easily understood rules

A good game for families as well as for seasoned gamers

Compares to:

Carcassonne as regards to tile placement

Other editions:

English edition from Mayfair Games

My rating: 7

Maria Schranz:

The game fascinates due to its relatively simple mechanisms and an extremely high replay value. An excellent game!

Chance (pink): 2

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 3

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 1

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0