Yesterday my wife and I unwrapped our brand new copy of Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island. We had a couple of friends over and we were excited to try the game right away, so we committed the cardinal sin of trying to play a board game without anyone knowing the rules in advance.

We had a blast, and ended up with a narrow victory… but later that evening I went back and read through the rules properly, and I discovered a ton of mistakes we had made in the rules.

The funny thing is that none of the mistakes significantly harmed the experience. Instead, each mistake made the game easier or harder, and it seems like they mostly canceled each other out, leaving us with a fun game and a decent challenge. It’s almost like we accidentally invented a variant.

Anyway, the game is highly recommended, and surprisingly robust to random rule changes. I wonder if that counts as a selling point?

Mistakes that made the game harder:

• We thought building a shelter/roof/palisade required 4 wood AND 3 fur, when actually it’s wood OR fur. This led to some very tense hunting expeditions.
• We thought the threat effect occurred at the start of every turn where the threat card is in play. Actually, it only happens when the threat card is pushed off the board. At one point this mistake cost us 6 wood (when the goal was to gather lots of wood…)

Mistakes that made the game easier:

• We missed the rule about actions being more expensive when taken far from the camp.
• We regularly Gathered Resources from the camp tile, apparently that’s not allowed. (This gave us a bunch of wood, which we mostly lost to threat effects or to bad weather since we couldn’t afford a roof…)
• We used the starting inventions that each character gets as items.

Yesterday my wife and I unwrapped our brand new copy of Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island. We had a couple of friends over and we were excited to try the game right away, so we committed the cardinal sin of trying to play a board game without anyone knowing the rules in advance.

We had a blast, and ended up with a narrow victory… but later that evening I went back and read through the rules properly, and I discovered a ton of mistakes we had made in the rules.

The funny thing is that none of the mistakes significantly harmed the experience. Instead, each mistake made the game easier or harder, and it seems like they mostly canceled each other out, leaving us with a fun game and a decent challenge. It’s almost like we accidentally invented a variant.

Anyway, the game is highly recommended, and surprisingly robust to random rule changes. I wonder if that counts as a selling point?

Mistakes that made the game harder:

• We thought building a shelter/roof/palisade required 4 wood AND 3 fur, when actually it’s wood OR fur. This led to some very tense hunting expeditions.
• We thought the threat effect occurred at the start of every turn where the threat card is in play. Actually, it only happens when the threat card is pushed off the board. At one point this mistake cost us 6 wood (when the goal was to gather lots of wood…)

Mistakes that made the game easier:

• We missed the rule about actions being more expensive when taken far from the camp.
• We regularly Gathered Resources from the camp tile, apparently that’s not allowed. (This gave us a bunch of wood, which we mostly lost to threat effects or to bad weather since we couldn’t afford a roof…)
• We used the starting inventions that each character gets as items.

Yesterday my wife and I unwrapped our brand new copy of Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island. We had a couple of friends over and we were excited to try the game right away, so we committed the cardinal sin of trying to play a board game without anyone knowing the rules in advance.

We had a blast, and ended up with a narrow victory… but later that evening I went back and read through the rules properly, and I discovered a ton of mistakes we had made in the rules.

The funny thing is that none of the mistakes significantly harmed the experience. Instead, each mistake made the game easier or harder, and it seems like they mostly canceled each other out, leaving us with a fun game and a decent challenge. It’s almost like we accidentally invented a variant.

Anyway, the game is highly recommended, and surprisingly robust to random rule changes. I wonder if that counts as a selling point?

Mistakes that made the game harder:

• We thought building a shelter/roof/palisade required 4 wood AND 3 fur, when actually it’s wood OR fur. This led to some very tense hunting expeditions.
• We thought the threat effect occurred at the start of every turn where the threat card is in play. Actually, it only happens when the threat card is pushed off the board. At one point this mistake cost us 6 wood (when the goal was to gather lots of wood…)

Mistakes that made the game easier:

• We missed the rule about actions being more expensive when taken far from the camp.
• We regularly Gathered Resources from the camp tile, apparently that’s not allowed. (This gave us a bunch of wood, which we mostly lost to threat effects or to bad weather since we couldn’t afford a roof…)
• We used the starting inventions that each character gets as items.