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Was this game easy to learn? To be fair, when we first opened up the game and saw all the landscape tiles, we thought, “Hey, this is going to be like Carcassonne.” Isle of Skye has some of those qualities, and is still easy to learn, even though it is a much different game. Six pages of rules with numerous illustrations took us all of five-minutes to figure out. How is it played? Each player represents a different clan fighting for control of the Isle of Skye, and begins with a player screen showing the name of their clan, a scoring token in the same color, a discard tile, and a landscape starter tile in their color. The landscape tile is their castle. In this game, each player is building their own territory – your tiles never combine with any other player’s tiles. So, make sure you have enough room in front of you to build your landscape.
The small game board, placed off to the side, is used for tracking scores (scoring tokens are placed on zero to start), and for keeping track of rounds. There are six rounds to every game. Then comes a really cool feature: There are four spots on the board to put four “scoring tiles.” From a total of 16 tiles, you randomly choose four and place them face up on the spots marked A-D. Each tile shows what you need to score points during a round. For example, in one of our games we had a tile that said, “You receive 2 VP for each cattle that is connected to your castle via roads.” In another game, “You receive 3 VP for each vertical line of at least 3 contiguous land tiles in your territory.” Which means the game can be totally different each time you play! You have to figure out what is important to do with your tiles to get the most VP at the end of each round. Each round, the space shows which scoring tiles apply – so, for example, in Round 1 we are looking to meet the “A” scoring tile needs, but in Round 3 we are looking to meet the “A, C & D” scoring tile requirements. Last, there is money in denominations of $1, $2, $5, and $10 to use throughout the game, and 73 landscape tiles shuffled in a bag prior to starting. Youngest player goes first – and is given a starting player token which is passed after each round. With two players it was not needed as much, but we used it. Here is what a round consists of:
Very easy! When your sixth round is over there is some final scoring to do:
Whoever has the most VP wins! Philip won BOTH games we played... Hmph! Jane still had a good time, though! How was the timing of the game? This is a quick game for two people – took us less than 30-minutes each time we played. You can play with up to five, so we assume the rounds would be longer with more players, but it would still be less than an hour for a full group. Fast Facts:
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Has Mayfair ever made a bad game? Well, if they have, we haven’t come across one yet. Two things we can always count on when buying a Mayfair game is 1) we are going to have fun, and 2) when punching out pieces they are the BEST quality – never tear or snag – very well crafted. Isle of Skye attests to our two points and we think you’ll really like it, too.
