How to play Survive the Island, a game of sinking and survival.
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Read the Rules
The aim of the game
To win, get your most valuable meeples to the safe corners of the board, before they meet their doom!
To set up
- For 2 players, you’ll play as 2 colours each, taking 20 meeples and 4 rafts.
- Place the sea serpents on their marked corner spaces
- and the sharks, kaijus and spare rafts by the side of the board.
- Now, take it in turns to place 1 of your meeples onto an empty island tile.
Each of your meeples have a value underneath, this is how many points they’re worth. You may look at these before you place them, but once the game starts, you’ll have to remember!
In a 5 player game, once every tile is full, you may place meeples on a tile occupied by just 1 other adventurer.
Finally, take it in turns to place 1 raft each on an empty water space adjacent to the island, until everyone has placed them both.
To play the game
The last player to have returned safe from an island goes first and play proceeds clockwise.
On your turn you’ll perform 3 steps:
- First you’ll move meeples and/or rafts.
- Next you’ll sink an island tile.
- And finally, you’ll roll the dice to move a creature.
Each turn you can move your pieces up to 3 spaces, divided among your meeples and rafts as you wish.
For example, you could move 1 meeple 3 spaces, 3 meeples one space, or a raft 2 spaces and a meeple 1 space, it’s up to you!
- Meeples can move onto spaces occupied by other meeples.
- Meeples in the water are swimming and can move a maximum of 1 space per turn.
- If a meeple enters the water, they cannot move any further that turn.
- If a meeple moves onto a space occupied by a raft or vice versa, if there’s room, they board it.
- Meeples can move between adjacent rafts if they wish.
- You can only move a raft if it’s empty, or you control it, by having as many, or more meeples on board than each of your opponents.
- More than 1 raft cannot occupy the same space.
- You can’t move your opponents meeples and you don’t have to move if you don’t want to.
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Once you move a meeple onto a corner island, it’s safe! Don’t turn it over until the end.
After moving, you must pick a single tile to sink, starting with the sand if available, then the forest if not, and finally the mountains.
Any adventurers on the tile are placed into the water beneath.
After choosing a tile, secretly look at it.
- If it’s red immediately apply its effect, before discarding it. You can find what each tile does on the back of the rulebook.
- If a tile is green, keep it face down in front of you. On future movement phases, you may use as many of the green tiles you have collected as you wish in addition to moving.
- The only exception is the repellant tile, which can be used reactively.
- Once you’ve used a tile, discard it.
- In the rare case you have no adventurers left to rescue, sink 2 tiles instead of 1.
Finally, roll the die. If the depicted creature is on the board, you MUST move it. At the start there’ll just be sea monsters, but sharks and kaiju will join as more tiles are revealed.
Monster movement:
- Sea creatures move 1 water space and eliminate all rafts and adventurers on the tile it moves onto, discarding them from play.
- Sharks move 1 or 2 water spaces and eliminate any swimmers, but not rafts.
- Kaijus move 1 or 2 spaces on land and or water, they destroy rafts but not adventurers.
- If a Kaiju enters a space occupied by meeples or monsters they push meeples onto an adjacent tile and displace any monsters according to their movement rules.
- For example, if I moved this kaiju here, it would destroy the raft and bump these meeples into the adjacent tiles of my choosing.
- Multiple sharks and sea monsters can occupy the same space, however nothing can enter a kaju space, apart from another kaiju, which would displace it.
- You could make a kaiju bump another kaiju into a sea monster to move the sea monster onto some meeples and eat them!
Game end and scoring
Take it in turns moving and using abilities, sinking a tile and moving a monster until either, there are no more adventurers left to rescue, OR the 3rd volcano tile is revealed, the game ends immediately.
Players turn over and total the values of the meeples they’ve rescued.
Whoever has the most points wins! In the case of a tie, share the victory.
That’s Survive the Island, where you’ll need to run for your life, while taking others!
Enjoy!