Base price: $XX.
2 – 4 players.
Play time: 15 – 20 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 2

Full disclosure: A preview copy of Fruit Island was provided by Analog Game Studios. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game. 

I’m procrastinating again. This is the much-more-forgivable form of procrastination, which is revenge bedtime procrastination, in which you just kind of hang out for the whole evening until it’s too late in the night as some sort of revenge for the Perceived Slight of being too busy during the day. This one happens to me a lot, and then I have to take a nap in the middle of the day because I didn’t sleep enough. Truly vicious cycle. This time, I’m putting off sleep because my suitcase is in the middle of the bed because I absolutely have to pack for a trip I’m taking shortly. I don’t love packing; I tend to overpack and that adds a lot of stress to my life. Oh well. There’s Kickstarter games coming up, though, so I need to focus up! That means we’re diving into the next one, Fruit Island, hitting Kickstarter on June 9!

In Fruit Island, players are monkeys who crave fruit the natural way: right off the tree. It’s fresh, it’s rich, and you can get a lot of it. However, there’s this gorilla, and the thing about sufficiently large gorillas is that they can eat off of any tree they want. And this one wants to eat off of every tree. If he sees you grabbing fruit and can get to you, he’s going to take your fruit and eat it himself. The only solution? Capitalism. You have to flee to the trading post and sell your fruit before he takes it so you can turn it into money, which is much harder for him to eat. He’s tried. It went poorly. Can you successfully engage in some monkey business?

Contents

• Setup
• Gameplay
• Player Count Differences
• Strategy
• Pros, Mehs, Cons
• Overall

Setup

Low-complexity. Place the board in the middle of the table:

Give each player a Monkey, placing them on the Trading Post in the center of the board. Place the Gorilla on any of the outer ring of spaces. He can’t go to the Trading Post; he abhors capital ventures. He’ll face clockwise, though.

Place both types of tokens into the bag and mix them up. That includes the Gorilla Tokens:

It also includes the Fruit Tokens:

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to start!

Gameplay

This one’s tricky, but not complicated. Each turn, you’re just going to draw a token and resolve it, and then move.

If you draw a Gorilla token, move him one space in the direction he’s currently facing for each coconut on the token. If there’s a circular arrow, flip him around and then move him 4 / 2 / 0 spaces if you’re playing with 2 / 3 / 4 players. If he lands on your space, he immediately takes your face-up fruit and discards it to the box! Too bad.

Once you’ve resolved the Gorilla token, draw another token. If it’s another Gorilla token, resolve it and continue this loop until you draw a Fruit Token. We’ve drawn four Gorilla tokens in a row before; it can be intense.

When you draw a Fruit Token, place it on any empty spot on a matching tree. If they’re all full, discard it back to the box. Then, move your Monkey 1 / 2 / 3 spaces in one direction. You can’t move through the Gorilla, but you can stop on spaces with other players. If you finish your movement on a tree that’s currently full, you gain all of those fruit face-up! If you finish your movement on the Trading Post, bank all your face-up fruit by turning them face-down.

Play continues until the bag is out of tokens! Count your face-up and face-down tokens and the player with the most points wins!

Player Count Differences

The game plays a bit differently at higher player counts, but that’s mostly because of how the turn flow works. Since each turn is driven by a token being pulled from the bag, there are a finite number of turns regardless of the number of players. With more players, then, you’ll personally get fewer turns. This means that you need to make those turns count and getting hit by the Gorilla carries more weight, since you get fewer turns. That’s not my favorite way to scale player count, here, since it makes the game feel slower on a per-player basis. Particularly, it’s an odd choice for a family-weight game, as you really want kids to stay engaged even when it’s not their turn. In ICECOOL, for instance, half of the fun is watching someone else make a killer shot or whiff it. Here, you’re just seeing someone else grab a token. Maybe their token pull will cause you to lose everything, which isn’t particularly fun for someone just watching. At lower player counts, you’re getting more turns, so you tend to feel a bit more involved. I lean towards the lower end with more players, but I wonder how they’ll address that with the Kickstarter.

Strategy

• Know when to hold and when to fold, I guess? There’s a lot of this in the game. You need to have a number where if you have more than that number of tokens, you start heading back. That number likely depends on your risk tolerance and how aggressive you want to play, but you should still have one! Don’t not bank your fruits.
• Counting cards is not an unacceptable thing to do. You can loosely keep track of how many Gorilla tokens you’ve seen of a certain type to get a loose sense of how safe you are. Please note that there’s a conditional recursive probability there because it’s P(you draw a Gorilla token) + P(if you draw a Gorilla token, you draw another one) and so on. Lots of conditionals there for an exact calculation, but it is calculable. If you try to do that math while we’re playing a game I’m going to throw you out of my house. Respectfully.
• Try not to end your turn on a tree space if you’re not taking fruit. You can’t move 0, so there’s no reason to block off a tree, especially since your opponent can still land there if they fill it up on their next turn.
• Always going back to the Trading Post is inefficient. It’s better to hang out and get more fruit, but the more you have, the more you’re risking.
• Strategically, you should always pray for something bad to happen to your opponent. It’s just good practice. Pretend you’re Topher Grace in Spider-Man 3.
• I try to place fruits away from my opponent if I can, even if that means filling up a tree. At least then they can’t get to them. Placing them on the opposite side of the Gorilla from my opponent is usually good, also.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• Very easy to pick up and play. You just draw a token and then move, essentially; not much more to it than that other than figuring out when to bank tokens.
• I think for a family game, it’s smart to have the negative player interaction be an external force rather than the players themselves. Granted, the Gorilla has to land on your space to take your stuff, but even then it’s the game attacking you rather than another player, even if it’s happening on their turn. Makes it more difficult to be mad.
• Certainly a quick game. Very quick! You’re just drawing tokens and keeping things moving.
• I like the board! I think it’s interesting that there are only two paths into the center, rather than a perfectly symmetrical board. I wonder if they’ll explore other board configurations during the Kickstarter?
• The risk / reward element of the game can be thrilling. Making it to a safe area when you have way too many Fruit Tokens and only barely escaped the Gorilla is the highlight of the game. It feels incredible and you’re usually pretty well set up to win. Losing it all, on the other hand, is bad, but them’s the breaks.

Mehs

• I am required to mention that my co-player was frustrated that bananas appear in the game but do not appear on the game’s cover. Personally, I don’t care, but, she was incensed about it. Even now, as I write, she’s next to me on the couch saying “it’s weird!“. I guess so?
• Hopefully they’ll double-side print the Gorilla for the full release. As it stands, it’s only printed on one side so when you have him face the other way it’s blank. That’s helpful for contrast but it’s still a bit difficult at times to remember which way he’s supposed to move. Some sort of arrow or something would be nice, honestly, but double-sided printing would be preferred.

Cons

• I think the game may have overindexed on simplicity in some ways at the cost of gameplay. I think, for instance, there are some elements that I wish players had more choice in. Letting players pick their trees for fruit is good! I wish I could pull some wild tokens or something that would let me determine what type of fruit I was adding where, as sometimes my only option is to help my opponent, which is frustrating (see below). Being able to influence the Gorilla’s movement would also be interesting, though it would undermine that family-friendly thing I mentioned earlier by letting players actively attack each other. Similarly, it would be nice if there were some final round or something that would let players pull from trees; it can be annoying when the game is about to end and you can’t pull from any trees.
• There’s a lot of luck to certain things coming together which can be mildly frustrating. If you get unlucky and fall behind, there’s no real recovery mechanism, for instance, which means you might be trailing for the rest of the game, unable to retake the lead. You may just also see luck not be in your favor, be it drawing fruits that don’t help you or consistently getting targeted by the Gorilla or your opponents finishing trees and collecting them before you can. The game’s very simple, but it doesn’t have many guardrails for adverse luck, and that can be frustrating even in a sufficiently short game.

Overall: 6.25 / 10

Overall, I think Fruit Island is fine! It reminds me pretty fondly of games that I would play when I was a kid, though it’s a bit more interesting than some of the simpler ones. Where I think this struggles against a family-weight game from, say, HABA, is that I think in the interest of approachability this game sacrifices choice more than complexity. The core loop of the game is potentially both fun and interesting: you run around picking fruits while trying to escape an angry gorilla. The challenge is that, as written, you don’t have enough influence over those actions to make it much more than a cute distraction. I can’t choose to point the Gorilla at my friends or move him towards the player with the most fruit; he just does his thing, moving slowly in a circle, and only occasionally turns around. The most influence I have is that I can place fruit near him to potentially bait my opponents into going over there, but even then, unable to pick from anything other than a full tree, sometimes my options are just limited. I think to make the game more interesting I’d like to see the game lean into those random elements a bit more or let players influence them to some degree? That all said, right now the game isn’t particularly problematic or anything like that; I just worry that it might not find widespread appeal beyond a younger audience for the lack of choices. And those choices could be interesting or whimsical or challenging! They’re just not present at the moment. I’ll certainly be interested in seeing what changes get made as the Kickstarter progresses, if any, though! In the meantime if you’re looking for a quick family title, you’d like an approachable starter board game, or you just enjoy monkeying about, you may enjoy Fruit Island! It’s a quick little starter game.

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