Isle of Skye: What's in Storr

As a fan of tile laying games (Carcassonne and My City being favourites), it was only a matter of time before I got my hands on Isle of Skye: From Chieftain to King. This review will focus on the base game. There are expansions which add  additional rules to the game which can make it more of a ‘thinky crunch’ but the base game is a quick game with a good level of strategic choices for under an hour.

In this game, as the title suggests, you start off as a chieftain trying to build out your territory and whoever has the most victory points will be crowned King (or Queen!) of the land. 2-5 players can play this game, but I have found 3-4 to be the optimal count based on my own experience. 2 player lacked some bite, but made a much less complicated take-that game which could also be positive for some.

Similar to Carcassonne, there are some rules on tiles that can connect which mostly make sense. You can make some disjointed connections but they lead to less income (I personally cannot abide my kingdom looking scruffy). Otherwise, tiles can contain different scenery (mountain, lake etc.) or items (boats, barrels etc.) which can be scoring conditions. Other scoring conditions can be size and layout of the kingdom (tiles placed). 

The victory points are based off 4 scoring conditions which are randomly chosen from 16 tiles which means the game has a good level of variety and players can choose to focus on different scoring conditions without a clear path to victory. I think this is a really awesome aspect to the game as it ensures that replayability is very high, even just for the base game.

Aside from tile laying, there is also a shopping action which can be thought of as a ‘you cut I choose’ whereby each player gets 3 tiles, where they simultaneously decide which one to discard and the price to assign for the remaining 2.

Each player then gets to buy 1 tile from the other players, for which they pay the price assigned. All unsold tiles will be bought by the initial player at the assigned price.

This is my favourite part of the game as it feels similar to other games in my collection where every decision hurts and you don’t want to give up anything (my review for Arboretum shows how much I enjoy pained decision-making).

Setting a high price may save the tile, but the cost may reduce your bargaining power in later rounds (especially as the game has a catch up mechanism where those lower in VP are given additional spending power).

Lastly, there are scrolls which adds unpredictability to the end game. Even if someone is down on VP, by completing scrolls (and terrains) they are able to improve their end game scoring. Therefore, everyone is invested until the very end to see who will be crowned the ruler of the Isle of Skye!