Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island - Tips & Strategies

I played this scenario 15 times (in different variants – solo, 2p and 3p) winning 4 or 5 of them. Here are my thoughts, just please keep in mind that any strategy in this game can be completely worthless due to the initial setup of starting items, cards etc.

1. Keep exploring as much as you can as fast as you can – the totems no. 3 and 4 are your best friends. Just watch out with whom you explore before you find totem no. 1. Loosing Friday in a 2p game at the beginning is not the best idea.

2. Do not bother with building shelter or roof unless you really are in an extremely comfortable situation. You don’t have time nor resources for it. Try rather to use the natural shelter and add palisade.

3. Don’t rescue Jenny too fast – she’s just another mouth to feed. Do it rather in fourth/fifth round even if you have built the raft sooner.

4. This is obvious for most of scenarios but is very important – control your morale. From the start build up your determination points income, especially taking the totem no.2 into consideration. You will be loosing morale quite fast due to wounds, so building any item incresing the gaining of determination points is a good idea.

In a solo or two-player game, the best way to deal with an Adventure token is to let Friday take a wound.

I hate Adventure tokens. Because there is nothing that you can actively do between the Event and Action phases to mitigate the effects of an Adventure card, and no way to know what those effects will even be until you have to resolve them, it is impossible to effectively plan or prepare for whatever nastyness an Adventure token will force you to endure. A single wound, by comparison, is easy to plan around, and can even be healed in the same round (using the Cook’s abilities).

Friday is immune to the effects of the Weather, Night, and Morale phases. This means that even if this tactic puts him at death’s door in the Action phase, he will still survive until the next round, and will always have the opportunity to heal by resting. Finally, Friday’s wounds cannot effect Morale, and even his demise does not end the game.

As cold and calculating as it sounds, letting Friday “take one for the team” is the best strategy for avoiding the random and potentially disastrous consequences of an Adventure token.

Keep the event dice ontop of the relevant event deck, when setting up.
Also, I use one of the extra cubes on the turn tracker. There are so many things to keep track of, that just remembering to update this before you move to the next phase, will help remind you what you need to do before the next phase starts… before it’s too late.

At the Portal Games site you can find two official scenarios: King Kong Island and The Naturalist (based on Darwin’s voyage). You can also find the mini-expansions of Trait cards 1 & 2 for print and play. These traits give some advantage to your character, together with a handicap, giving that extra of characterization that a narrative game needs.

You can print this new material, or use a tablet to directly play the new scenarios. Now your game is 40% cooler and will provide you with an even huger amount of replayability than it already had.

When you play solo, play with “Friday” and the dog, they can help you survive on the Island giving you extra pawn for your actions

Choose your caracter according to the goal of the scenario but the Carpenter is the one I think is better to play solo:
– he can use 3 determinations token to get a extra Brown pawn for construction.
– he can use 2 determination token to reduce the Wood cost

So with the dog green pawn and the extra Brown pawn your survival chance are a bit better for almost most scenario

First things first – I hate this scenario, I simply hate it. You need to have enourmous amount of luck just to have a small chance of winning. And it’s almost all decided during the setup and first two rounds.

After around 25 tries from which I have won 3 or 4 here are my thoughts:

1. Do not haste with exploring – one tile per round. If you uncover a totem, your next round should consist burning down the village and exploring another tile. Its crucial not to sum up totems before burning the villages down as it makes them stronger, and dont give you a chance of moving your camp during next rounds. Remember that during the round, the fighting faze comes before the exploration one, use it as an advantage.

2. You need “bed” invention. In every attempt that I have succeded in I had this one. Either by obtaining it during set up or thanks to carpenters ability. This means that carpenter is an obvious choice as one of the “survivors”. The “sling shot” is also nice to have invention.

3. The obvious one – build up your weapon strenght. Its more important than gathering food – especially when you have “bed”.

4. Save one of your characters for the last battle. Do not risk his health with exploring or any kind of dice rolling.

Beside of the above you will still need A LOT of luck regarding the events cards draw. If some of you have any better tactics for this scenario I’ll be glad to learn them.

Creator of the game just released a new scenario for Robinson Crusoe, based on adventures of Dr. Livingstone. You can find a bit of a story about it and download the scenario for free over at http://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/31367/new-scenario-for-robinson-have-fun

A clarification that I really wish I had ahead of time.

In Scenario 2 – Cursed Island – when your event card has a book on it – you need to put two fog tokens on island tiles. These tiles do not have to be opened/explored. Can be empty ones. Otherwise all of your explored tiles become covered in fog extremely fast and you can’t do anything. Do not make the same mistake I did – the game is hard enough as it is 🙂

Try to explore the tiles to the center of the Island (3 tiles right) in the firsts round. From there it’s easier for every one to explore without having to spend a 3rd extra action.

Be sure that you put your camp on a tile that both have food and wood

This is not so much a house rule, as a loophole that I noticed in the existing (English edition) rules, while playing Robinson with two-players (and Friday).

There is nothing in the rules, that prevents Friday from re-rolling a failure with the Determination tokens that he “earned” from that failure.

For every other instance in which a special ability permits spending Determination tokens to re-roll a failure, there is included in the rule-book a clause:

“Note! You cannot use the Determination tokens gained from an unsuccessful die roll to reroll that die which gave you those Determination tokens.”

Such a clause is conspicuously absent in the description of Friday’s ability. This makes a certain amount of sense, when one considers that Friday is a native of the Cursed Isle. He is perfectly capable of finding food and shelter for himself, and he knows the dangers of the island well enough to avoid any accident more serious than a wound. Given these attributes, it seems reasonable that, for example, gathering resources would be much easier for him than for the other castaways.