Small Islands

[Nicholasb24]

Hello everybody,

Small Islands a Tiles Game is now available in Beta Test.

We need you to push the game to the foward step.

Thank you for your help

Best Regards

Nicholas

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Bonjour à tous,

Small Islands, un jeu de Tuiles est maintenant disponible en Beta test.
Nous avons besoin de vous, pour le passer à l'étape suivante.

Par avance, merci de votre soutient.

Bien à vous

Nicholas

[Tecmes]

Thanks for this game.
There are some things I don't quite understand about this game's design.
It's highly appealing, beautiful and the basic mechanic is clever. In fact I immediately put it on my "cardboard buy" list... until I played and found some issues, in my opinion

- Island fragmentation.
There is little incentive that I can see for completing islands. Making sprawling "sand banks" seems not only OK, but safer (as you can increase their size more easily). Also each player can work on its own island. The end result is not small islands, it's a very large archipel of ugly unfinished islands that you spread out turn over turn. Why not simply have completed islands count double (yeah, ala Carcassonne)?

- Houses
There hardly seemed to be any chance of running out of house spaces, so why have them at all? IN fact, if you can only place one per island, why have those spots? Why have houses at all, rather than scoring, say, up to two islands per turn?

- Disposable islands
The fact that you score an island only once confused me a lot. You can plan a lot ahead, with the interesting "mission keep" system. But planning merely means building two islands in parallel. Not only you shouldn't, but you actually can't develop islands to be multi-purpose. IF houses marked islands as the one(s) you're scoring on *each* turn, that would make a bit difference here. And...

- Two solitudes
At least with 2 PL ( which will be the most frequent situation even on BGA?), there's not much in the way of fighting over islands. Each can build his one or two islands apart from each other, because there is no spread limit. UNless you want to be mean and somehwat randomly put closing tiles on the others'. Because there is no incentive to work on the same island, the strategy where you add tiles you like while hampering the opponent doesn't seem worth the hassle. Just make a "sand bank" somehwere else...

- Boats
I failed to get any excitement about playing a boat tile or caring about ports. Why not have boats (maybe as meeples) actually connect (completed) islands (through ports) to score more than one (one house controlling two+ islands)? That would force a compact, centered, layout and prevent "dinner table spread".

- Tokens
Because of high flexibility you are affored for placing tiles, those tokens don't seem very crucial. If completing an island was an issue, I would see the point a lot more.

- Tile choices
I don't much see the point in having a hand on top of choosing a tile. Though the "stop or continue" mechanic is simple and nice.

- Naming of elements
Confused me, even when reading the rules text. Why not call the tiles, "tiles", with a "tile reserve", a "current tile stack", "3 available tiles". KISS.

[MasterCefas]

Hi!

I am playing a turn based game of Small Islands:

Table #107753425
Move #14
Progression 0%
link: https://boardgamearena.com/1/smallislan ... =107753425

The game asks me to draw a tile, but when I click one tile he says I already have 3 in hand. What I am doing wrong? Where should I click? I can not make progress due to this error.

Thanks for any help!

[RicardoRix]

why is there a timer countdown on one of the actions?

Playing on a laptop, the tile map is immediately too small after playing a couple of tiles.
If I click 'enlarge the display' this appears to be where it should have been to start with.

--------

yeah I just missed my turn because I was messing around with the display. Double whammy.

[paramesis]

I have just taken my first turn of my first game and I found the automatic timer very disruptive to learning the game and playing it for the first time. During the last phase of a turn-based game, I was asked whether I would like to place a bonus token. I would have liked to check the rules again to make sure I understand the impact of that decision, but the timer made this impossible.

I have created a suggestion report for it here.
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=22963
Please consider removing it or at least making it optional, as has been done recently in Steam Works.

It is easy to overestimate the occurrence of players forgetting to confirm/end their turn and to underestimate the stress and disruption caused by a countdown timer on players who aren't experienced with the game.

The interpretation of the guidelines that any end-turn confirmation or final action should have a countdown timer is only a very recent trend, and I have made my case against it here: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 12&t=16770

[marcnelsonjr]

I could not get the game to load when playing on an iPad - the screen was stuck on "loading game box". This problem occurred with two different devices running older versions of Safari.

This is the only game on BGA I've had this problem with.

[PatatoKen]

Thanks for this game.
There are some things I don't quite understand about this game's design.
It's highly appealing, beautiful and the basic mechanic is clever. In fact I immediately put it on my "cardboard buy" list... until I played and found some issues, in my opinion

- Island fragmentation.
There is little incentive that I can see for completing islands. Making sprawling "sand banks" seems not only OK, but safer (as you can increase their size more easily). Also each player can work on its own island. The end result is not small islands, it's a very large archipel of ugly unfinished islands that you spread out turn over turn. Why not simply have completed islands count double (yeah, ala Carcassonne)?

- Houses
There hardly seemed to be any chance of running out of house spaces, so why have them at all? IN fact, if you can only place one per island, why have those spots? Why have houses at all, rather than scoring, say, up to two islands per turn?

- Disposable islands
The fact that you score an island only once confused me a lot. You can plan a lot ahead, with the interesting "mission keep" system. But planning merely means building two islands in parallel. Not only you shouldn't, but you actually can't develop islands to be multi-purpose. IF houses marked islands as the one(s) you're scoring on *each* turn, that would make a bit difference here. And...

- Two solitudes
At least with 2 PL ( which will be the most frequent situation even on BGA?), there's not much in the way of fighting over islands. Each can build his one or two islands apart from each other, because there is no spread limit. UNless you want to be mean and somehwat randomly put closing tiles on the others'. Because there is no incentive to work on the same island, the strategy where you add tiles you like while hampering the opponent doesn't seem worth the hassle. Just make a "sand bank" somehwere else...

- Boats
I failed to get any excitement about playing a boat tile or caring about ports. Why not have boats (maybe as meeples) actually connect (completed) islands (through ports) to score more than one (one house controlling two+ islands)? That would force a compact, centered, layout and prevent "dinner table spread".

- Tokens
Because of high flexibility you are affored for placing tiles, those tokens don't seem very crucial. If completing an island was an issue, I would see the point a lot more.

- Tile choices
I don't much see the point in having a hand on top of choosing a tile. Though the "stop or continue" mechanic is simple and nice.

- Naming of elements
Confused me, even when reading the rules text. Why not call the tiles, "tiles", with a "tile reserve", a "current tile stack", "3 available tiles". KISS.

Hello, I'm the game designer and I'm sorry but I just spent one hour to answer to all of your questions and when I posted it an error occurs and all the text has been lost. I'm very disappointed about this...
I don't have time to write again the answers. So I give you the short version...

All the game has been designed to be a game of timing: "how many, where and when do I place my houses?"...
Without the houses mechanic the game would not be the same at all.
One of the thing is that without houses you would have to count each island at each round for scoring and it would take a horribly long time.

You see big and ugly unfinished islands. In my point of view I see beautiful small Islands. For me the unfinished islands are territories not entirely explored and cartographied.

House spaces are in the game for ergonomic reason. I did not want these to be very competitive. It's already difficult for some players to achieve and optimize their objectives.

The reserved objective system is here to give more control and flexibility. And most of the time you play according to your current objective. In fact it's difficult to anticipate on you reserved objective. It's possible but you have to be an experienced player on this game.

If you want to win the game, it's not a good way to make only islands apart from each other player. It's much better to try to take advantage of the islands and the tiles played by other players, and to do that you have to play also on "their islands".

Young think that there is high flexibility in the game and that the bonus token and hand of tiles are useless but I'm not agree with that. There are often situations in the game that can be very frustrating. Bonus tokens are here to help players and give more control on the game. Even when they seem useless, it'important to play them at the right moment and on the right place to achieve your objective or to optimize it.

I already try something like your idea for the boats, and it was too strong and that killed the game. So I did not keep it. I think the bonus point for the boat is an elegant way to give flexibility and another strategic way to score points.

We worked hard on writing the rulebook, but I agree that some details could have been better

Be sure that I already thought and try all you say and even more during the development of the game. There is some of this things that did not work, some that was less good, and some which for I made personal choices... Sorry if some of these choices don't match with what you expected...

[wpollock]

Thanks to developers for this. Really like the implementation so far, some smart choices with highlighting placed tiles, and auto-rotating them to sensible placements. Two questions regarding features:

The rules said the first player gets to arrange the starting tiles however they want, but we didn't seem to get that opportunity. Did we miss this? Will this be included if it's not there?

Could a final score breakdown (really, just points from ships) be added for all players, not just premium ones?

[Nicholasb24]

Hello,

Thank you for your motivation

1/ in the real game, the first player choose the starting setup. Not in BGA. It's random (currently, maybe in a new futru version)
2/ Yes, for the tie. It's the last "bug" we have to resolve.

So thank you again and please share the game.

Thank you

Regards