Have you ever flown on an island puddle-jumper plane? I have, once on a family vacation. These aren’t the vessels to take if you’re afraid of flying. The pilot had to ask us our weights to balance the plane, the door between him and the seats was a curtain, and I’m pretty sure if I’d sneezed it would have rocked the plane. Nevertheless, these airborne tin cans serve their purpose admirably. Island Hopper is a game of hopping behind the controls - or paying a friend to man them - and delivering goods from island to island in a light bidding-dexterity game. Unfortunately, while the core concept and design is great the execution is a bit bumpy.

The best dexterity games have a bit of frivolity to them that makes up for the times an errant flick destroys whatever plans you may have developed. They trade hilarity for cerebral strategy. Despite often being competitive games, the whole table will erupt in cheers when someone makes a great play and share in schadenfreude when disaster strikes. Island Hopper has a light dexterity element that, to be fair, does create some communal energy. However, it’s almost too simple to provide the highs that make up for the times the kinetic chaos messes things up.

In Island Hopper players fly goods from island to island attempting to fulfill contracts. Flight involves picking up a chunky wooden piece off a center tile, closing your eyes, and attempting to move your hand over the destination and dropping the good from a few inches off the surface. While the captain of the rickety plane can’t fulfill any of her own contracts while flying, her income comes from the bribes of cash the other players have placed near these islands in the hope of encouraging a delivery. This gives other players a vested interest in the captain’s success.

These players can aid - or hinder- the captain by paying for the privilege of providing 1 word commands. Cries of “Stop!”, “Farther!”, “Left!” and more will ring out while the blind captain attempts to discern who is helping and who is being a little twerp. In theory. Like so many of Island Hopper’s mechanisms, this system never really reaches its lofty potential. The captain knows who stacked bribes next to an island so it's easy to ignore everyone else and listen only to the person or people you know want to see you fly there. At low player counts it becomes difficult to create sets for end of game scoring, but at high player counts the inevitability of each good being flown files of the edges of the negotiating phase.

There’s a limited ability to cycle the cards in your hand, which means the players who wanted goods delivered to a specific island will likely still want those goods delivered on future turns should the pilot fail so there’s rarely an opportunity for a player to change their mind about a delivery in a future round. Even a pilot’s successes and failures are absent the joy that should accompany a dexterity game. A miss is more frustrating than it is funny; a success is too expected to be exciting.

This is unfortunate because the economic balance of goods, contracts, and the bidding required to fly the plane and entice the captain feels darn near perfect. The end-game set bonuses set you on a clear course, and there’s a great push and pull to how much you want to bribe the captain. The core ideas of Island Hopper are excellent it just feels like it’s adrift in the Bermuda Triangle, unsure of what it wants to be. It isn’t kinetic enough to be a great dexterity game and there’s no strategic recourse for bad pilots or bad draws.

I’ve rarely come across games I want to love so much more than I do. Again, the main ideas here are great. Blind flights across the islands, dexterity based good delivery, and economic bribery are great. They just weren’t developed into the sleek G5 they could have been. Like the claptrap plane on the cover, Island Hopper is perfectly functional. Unfortunately it just isn’t very fun.

Raf Reviews - Island Hopper

Rafael Cordero

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