Islanders is one of those games I think I will never tire of. It’s beautiful, as players hover above a sequence of wonderfully breezy island chains placing dinky little buildings. And it’s tart and tactical, too, since the buildings you place all have specific desires concerning where they want to be and where they absolutely don’t want to be. You need to keep the scores from each placement high, because your scores unlock new building packs. Cheery as it all seems, you can fail in Islanders quite easily, and be left with no more buildings to place.
Islanders: New Shores doesn’t really alter any of the basics, because they work so beautifully well in the first place. Instead, it adds new elements, but carefully, so as not to unbalance such an elegant design. These elements are consequential, but they don’t change the ruminative tweezer work that Islanders is so good at creating for the player. It’s still a game where you lean in close over the craggy little model you’re making and drop a new building in just…so…!
A typical example of this way of thinking is the process of moving to a new island. Space is finite on each map, so when your island is almost full, hopefully you’ve hit the score target to unlock a new island and move on. Same as it ever was. But now you get a choice of islands to move to, each with their own quirks and special buildings. Tundra islands are snowy landscapes with ice floes on the shoreline, for example. Their special building is the pyre, which you’re encouraged to place far apart from one another but within a line of sight. Lava islands are exactly what you’d expect: little bits of rock floating in lakes of fire. Luckily they come with the terrace building that essentially allows you to place new land to build upon.
This stuff is lovely, and it’s game enhancing rather than transforming, which I think is what the developers have been going for. This is a team that has woven a spell, and doesn’t want to break it. Other standout tweaks include boons, for example, and boons are little shifts to the rules that you can employ – you choose from a couple each time – but for the most part they’re locked to the island you’re currently on. A nudge, but it can’t get out of hand.
Boons are excellent. One might allow you to reroll which buildings you pick between next, while another might allow you to place two identical buildings next to each other without picking up any negative points. They fit well into the friendly “A or B?” rhythms of Islanders, and they also encourage you to really dig into the rules that you’re altering. And as additions to the rules go, they’re like islands themselves: they have a finite and clearly bordered impact on the game.
I’m still playing New Shores in a state of quiet discovery. I’m still learning things with every game. I’ve realised that there are new design preoccupations on the building side of things, for example. The original game often calculated points based on the proximity of buildings. New Shores is equally concerned with lines of sight, as with the pyres. This opens up the game’s vertical space and encourages you to spread out across an archipelago, maybe specialising with each little islet.
Just now, though, I unlocked something that changed the game for me utterly – but on an imaginative rather than a mechanical level. I just place my first lighthouse, high up on a spar of rock where its influence radiates over a nearby stretch of water. It’s a beautiful thing and I can’t stop looking at it.
And with that unlock I have the answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking. What’s Islanders been missing? Reader, it’s been missing a lighthouse.