Forbidden Island

Matt Leacock. Art by C. B. Canga. Gamewright, 2010.

2-4 players | 30 minutes | AGE 10+

Forbidden Island is a collaborative game during which players work together to collect four treasures from a fantasy island and escape before the island sinks under the water. Players take turns moving their pawns around the island, which is not a traditional game board but a map built by arranging the tiles randomly before play begins. As the game progresses, more and more island tiles sink, becoming unavailable, and the pace increases. Players take actions (which include moving, shoring up tiles, and swapping resources) to keep the island from sinking, while trying to collect treasures and items. After each turn, tiles continue to flood, with water level rises increasing the number of flooded tiles following the appearance of a dynamic event card. As the water level rises, gameplay gets more difficult and sacrifices must be made: the island cannot be saved but certain tiles can be protected until the treasure has been extracted.

Workshop participants identified this game as generative for discussions of the climate emergency, even though it is not explicitly themed around nature or climate change and is seemingly set in a secondary fantasy world. On a surface level, the game prompts discussion about rising sea levels across the globe already underway and projected to become much worse in the next few decades. Project participants suggested that the game positions players in a combative relationship against the natural world, which emerges as the antagonist aiming to thwart their efforts to collect treasure. In its use of the apocalyptic flood as a threat, Forbidden Island perpetuates what Simon Estok calls ‘ecophobia’ (2018). Estok defines ecophobia as a uniquely human psychological condition that prompts antipathy toward nature, suggesting it has derived from modernity’s irrational fear of nature and has been perpetuated in pervasive literary and media representations (2018: 1). Ecophobia creates an antagonism between humans and their environments, which is gamified in Forbidden Island in which nature is explicitly the players’ opponent. The ‘waters rise’ cards, which are drawn periodically prompting calamity for the players, offer no explanation for the flooding beyond the inscrutable machinations of an inhospitable environment. Estok suggests that the ecophobic condition has also greatly serviced growth economies and ideological interests, underwriting the extraction and destruction that has fed climate change and mass extinction. This extractive logic is built into Forbidden Island, too, since the island is only valuable for the treasures it holds. Players are not incentivised to save the environment they traverse beyond shoring up those tiles they need to access the treasures and then escape. Game hacks discussed included changing the winning conditions from extracting treasures to saving the island by mitigating the effects of rising waters. Participants discussed the addition of cards that would allow players to work with the environment rather than against it.