Toriki: The Castaway Island

You are part of a group that has shipwrecked on the island of Toriki. But wait.. a bunch of kids, shipwrecked on an island… Never mind that! You need to explore the island to find supplies and a way out… while cataloging new species you find along the way!

Toriki: The Castaway Island is a game for up to four players, ages 8 and up. With four players, each session takes about 30 minutes. Toriki was designed by Wojciech Grajkowski and published by Lucky Duck Games.

Setup

This hybrid board game plucks at the heartstrings of parents who cut their teeth on point-and-click video games. In fact, the first step in playing Toriki is to download the app (Google Play, Apple Store, or Steam).

Each player takes a colored meeple and you put pretty much everything else in the middle of the table: Map Module One (the main map), the Camp Board, the Coin Board, and the Item and Mission Card Decks. Don’t shuffle these cards or even look through them! They’re ordered and you’ll work through them as the campaign progresses. Put the food tokens in a pile and leave everything else in the box. The app will tell you when to take things out.

Gameplay

Toriki is constructed around the passing of a day. Days begin with a few short paragraphs in the app about the events of the previous evening, usually prompting players to consider a new challenge in the form of a Mission.

Each player gets three turns round-robin style, representing the morning, mid-day, and afternoon. On a turn, first move your meeple to a new location. Moving a single step to an adjacent map hex is free; walking further will cost you one food for each space passed over.

Once your movement is complete (or if you decide not to move), enter your current location on the app, and find out some more information about where you are.

Now, you have the option to use an item (scanning its QR code), or possibly take a location-specific action.

If you’re at the main camp, you could also try to combine items, scanning multiple cards to see if they produce something new.

Like the Sands in the Hour Glass

So are the mysteries of the island. After every player takes their three turns the app triggers the end of the day, and everyone’s meeple moves to a campsite.

It seems like every day brings with it some new challenge on Toriki!

Over the course of the campaign you’ll search for food, build a shelter, find hidden coins, and discover new species to help your friend the Professor. You get to write down the names you choose and other attributes for these new species in your Wildlife Catalog, a real paper book.

Playing through the entire story will take many hours (the rulebook says 6-8). The app prompts you to save the game at the end of any day, and there’s a menu option to save at other times if necessary.

The app tracks all of the components and items your group currently has (other than food), and you can trade items whenever you’re stopped in the same space as another player. So saving is pretty easy – the app just asks where each player is on the map.

As you work through the game you’ll uncover secrets on the island of Toriki and eventually find a way off the island! Once you leave, the app rates your performance based on the Missions you completed, coins you found, and species you discovered. You can take as many days on the island as you want without changing your score – so take your time and discover all Toriki has to offer!

Impressions

What possible use could a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle have?
– Guybrush Threepwood, The Secret of Monkey Island

Classic point-and-click adventure video games (like Monkey Island) sometimes use items as puzzle signposts: finding a certain item suggests that there will certainly be a use for it elsewhere in the game.

Toriki does this too, through subtle (and not-so-subtle) breadcrumbs strewn throughout. Some puzzles must be approached head-on (Mission 1 is “find three sources of food”), but most are best approached through experimentation. Everything about the game encourages players to explore: “can I use a shovel in this swamp?” or “can I attach a hook to a piece of string?”

The results of these experiments range from disappointing (nothing happens) to extremely rewarding (we discovered a hidden location by chance)… and occasionally hilarious. But experiments aren’t always successful – there were plenty of times the app threw up “You can’t use that here”, and a few times that a character got poisoned (no lasting effects, they just lost the rest of their day).

A Gentle Adventure

We played Toriki with our 11 year old and 14 year old sons. We had a good time, but I think this game would be best with kids at the younger end of the suggested age range.

The story is very forgiving. No one ever dies on the island (although you do find some long-dead skeletons), and although there are scary moments, failing a challenge only results in losing a turn or losing food. This can slow the game down slightly, but doesn’t hurt much.

You can spend as many “days” on the island as you want; since the very first mission is to set up renewing food sources, you can keep moving and exploring without running out of options.

Families will get the most out of this game by exploring it as thoroughly as possible, and experimenting with everything.

You, too, can uncover all the secrets of Toriki: The Castaway Island. Find it on Amazon or buy it directly from Lucky Duck Games.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Toriki: The Castaway Island from Lucky Duck Games for this review.

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