Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is a game created by Ignacy Trzewiczek, the author of Stronghold. This time Trzewiczek takes the players to a deserted island, where they’ll play the parts of shipwreck survivors confronted by an extraordinary adventure. They’ll be faced with the challenges of building a shelter, finding food, fighting wild beasts, and protecting themselves from weather changes. Building walls around their homes, animal domestication, constructing weapons and tools from what they find, and much more await them on the island. The players decide in which direction the game will unfold and – after several in-game weeks of hard work – how their settlement will look. Will they manage to discover the secret of the island in the meantime? Will they find a pirate treasure, or an abandoned village? Will they discover an underground city or a cursed temple at the bottom of a volcano? Answers to these questions lie in hundreds of event cards and hundreds of object and structure cards that can be used during the game…
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Good attempt. Volcano Island is hard because it is completely luck dependent. I know it is winnable because the last time my group played it we won because we just got lucky with both our token draws and our treasure card draws. After your first adventure draw you had a question about the word items on the card. Items are the opposite side of invention cards. If you look at the build rule you will that upon building the player turns the card from the invention side to the item side. The card also had some context clues as the wording at the top of the card was "your tools are failing" which implies it was usable items that were affected. If that card had come up the bottom half of the card would have instructed you to turn the marked items to the invention side which would have probably made it a bit more clear. I swear at some point I'm going to catch one of these plays live.
The cards indeed seem to come up very brutal. It was nice to watch anyway.
I do want to point out 2 things from the initial discussion. The first one is that the scenario asks you to explore 8 tiles, so you are not limited to only these tiles and you don't have to remove any from the game. although in this case, there are only 8 spots left on the board where tiles can be placed, so essentially with 4 players, they are asking you to explore all spots on the board.
The other thing is that you seem to be thinking wrong about what you loose when moving your camp. It was difficult in the original manual, and they tried to fix the rules in the newer versions, but it stays confusing. Best is just to check the example in the rules. But in short, you loose half, and then round up. So if you are on 1 roof/palisade. You don't loose it while moving. With 2 or 3, you move 1 down, and with 4 you move 2 down.
And then for the question about during the game for exploring the totems if you have to roll the die or not, it is just like any other explore action. It depends on how many pawns you have used for exploring the site, keeping in mind the distance from your camp and the extra pawn needed because of the scenario effect. So with 2 pawns, you indeed needed to roll. You could have put 3 pawns there to have an auto success.