Cooper Island
$40.99
Cooper Island at a Glance
| Game Type Nautical Theme, Tile Placement, Worker Placement | Play Time 60 - 120 mins | Skill/Complexity (4.2 - 5) Heavy |
| Age 12+ | Publisher(s) Capstone Games | Published 2019 |
| Categories Strategy | Players 1 - 4 | Cost $40.99 approx. |
| Our Rating 8.4/10 |
About – Description
After discovering a new island six years ago, you, along with your dog Cooper, have returned with your ships and crew of workers to explore and settle this new place for you to call home. Other groups have joined you as well, each exploring different peninsulas of the island. But whose settling crew will be the most prosperous?
Cooper Island is a heavy-weight tile-laying and worker-placement game designed by Andreas Odendahl which was nominated for the 2019 Meeples’ Choice Award. At first glance, this game will remind many people of the classic Catan; it has different terrain types like mountains, meadows, forests, ports with ships, and player components that look similar to the settlements and cities found in that game. However, this game couldn’t possibly be more different.
In Cooper Island, there’s no trading wood for sheep, there’s no moving a robber or hoping for the dice to work in your favor – only a brain-burning mesh of complex strategy as you try to figure out how exactly you will make the many moving pieces of this game work together to inch your way to victory.
Best Suited for Experienced Gamers
There’s no question that Cooper Island is best suited for experienced gamers that enjoy games on the thinky/heavy end of the weight spectrum and who put a greater emphasis on game mechanisms than immersive narrative theme.
Gamers who enjoy games with a lot of strategic decisions to make, including long-term scoring bonuses and thinking through your turns many steps ahead, will likely appreciate everything this game has to offer. This is not a game that I would recommend pulling out and attempting to teach to people who have not played many modern board games.
Skill/Complexity (heavy weight)
While I wouldn’t necessarily define the rules in Cooper Island to be that complex, the heavy nature of the game comes from the sheer number of options you have on your turn, and trying to focus your strategy in order to achieve your goal of having the most helm points (i.e., how far you’ve managed to sail your ships away from your port), which can be very challenging to accomplish. In order to make everything work, you will need to be efficient in placing tiles on your peninsula to generate the right kinds of resources you need in order to perform the actions and achieve the bonuses that will help you win the game.
On my first turn of the game alone, as I looked down at my player board, the tiles I was holding in my hand for my initial placement, I had about a thousand things going through my head in terms of what I can try to focus on in order to win the game – and it was enough to make me feel like my brain was going to explode. Whether you see this as a good or bad thing will truly determine whether this is a game for you.
Gameplay and Insights
There is certainly a lot going on in Cooper Island, more than I could possibly try and explain here in a few short paragraphs. But a few of the core aspects of gameplay that I think are worth noting are the tile-placing, resource production, worker-placement, and scoring.
Cooper Island has a very unique way of integrating tile placement. The standard tiles in the game are double-hexed and double-sided. There are two types: land tiles and port tiles (with one hex being a landscape and the other being a port that provides a certain bonus). When you place a tile, it immediately produces a resource of its type indicated by a cube that gets placed on top of the hex. The cool twist is that you can stack a hex on top of an empty hex of the same terrain type, and the resource cube value is multiplied by the height of the stack of tiles below it (for instance, a cube on top of three forest tiles is worth three wood). You can also spend “cartography points” (from your cartography track) in order to be able to place a single hex of a certain terrain type in order to fill gaps on your board as you try to place a tile of a certain height.
The only time your terrain produces resources is when you place a tile – and when you spend resources, you can spend it directly from your hexes on the board. Another interesting twist here is if you decide to build a building (which give you points and other bonuses), you must place it on your highest empty hex, thus making that hex no longer accessible for tile placement. It’s a very challenging balance – producing resources and constructing buildings.
Players also take turns in a round performing worker-placement actions, and I really liked the way that Cooper Island provides players with standard workers to start the game, with the option of bringing in upgraded workers on future turns. Each action spot on the board has a standard action space, and an upgraded action space (which can give added bonuses and allow you to perform both options at a space rather than one). Each player starts the game with three standard (circle) workers, and players can unlock special workers by reaching different achievement thresholds as listed on their player board. When they move their special worker into their available worker area, if there is a standard worker there, that worker gets “bumped” to an end-game scoring bonus card of their choosing (each card can only hold one worker).
The way the ship movement and scoring works is also pretty unique. Players have two ships which move around their peninsula (and rest of island) in opposite directions. At the end of the game, players receive “helm points” equal to the distance between their ships and their port. In other words, if you are doing a lot of “stuff” in the game but not making your ships move, you will lose the game guaranteed – and sometimes it’s easy to lose focus on that. Also, when a ship crosses a port (regardless of who owns it), you receive the bonus indicated on that port tile. This provides an aspect of positive player interaction, which is always great to see in games.
Versions/Editions/Expansions
Given the fact that Cooper Island is a relatively new game, there haven’t been any new versions or editions released to date, with the exception of the fact that the first printing of the game did not include the solo mode deck, but current print-runs do.
There is currently one expansion for Cooper Island: a promotional item called Cooper Island: New Boats. This contains 4 new income boats, each with unique bonuses.
Player Count
Cooper Island plays 1 – 4 players. I have only played the game at the 4-player count, but given the lack of much player interaction in the game, I imagine it would play similarly at other player counts. The game does have varying setups for different numbers of players, so it appears to scale quite well. According to BoardGameGeek, the best player count is 3 as voted on by the public.
The only aspect of the game that might feel different with fewer players is the fact that there would be less competition for the worker-placement action spots, but I also think that there would be considerably less downtime with 2 players compared to 4, so it really depends on which of these is more important to you.
Likes & Dislikes
I can always tell how much I enjoyed a game by how much I continued to think about it after it was done, and Cooper Island is one I have continued to think about. Here are some things that I really liked about it, and there are some potential negatives to Cooper Island that I think are worth considering.
- Deep strategic decision-making – I felt like every turn of the game mattered, and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to figure out how to make all the moving pieces of the game work together in my favor. It was truly a challenge, but in a very good way. I found myself thinking several steps ahead, and I personally enjoy that in a game.
- Unique tile-placement and resource management – I quite enjoyed the way tile-placement works in the game with regards to generating resources and trying to get tiles to stack up in the right way to gain you the right number of resources for a specific action or bonus you are trying to achieve.
- So many bonuses and satisfying turns – I always like when games make me feel constantly rewarded for decisions I make, and Cooper Island is full of little bonuses that you achieve throughout the game. When you cross a port, you get a bonus. When you place a tile, you get a resource. When you fill a cargo ship, you remove a chip which goes onto your player board, which you can use to get a bonus. When you build a town, you get a bonus card. When you build a city, you get an even better bonus card – and so on, and so forth. There were very few turns in this game that felt dull or unrewarding, and I loved that.
- The scoring system – I really liked the simplicity of scoring in the game. It really boils down to how far you can move your ships, and the end-game bonuses you unlock (and your ability to fulfill their requirements). I appreciate it when games make the objective very clear and simple, but make it challenging to achieve that objective.
- The special worker actions spots – I thought it was really exciting when I was finally able to unlock one of my special workers and use the special action spots on the board. This only added to the sense of progression that game provides and the fact that every turn can feel very satisfying – this is especially the case as the game progresses.
- Analysis Paralysis (AP) – I think this game is very AP-prone, and sometimes it can take quite a while to get back to your turn. However, I did really like the fact that the beginning (income) phase of each round was simultaneous, and this helped to speed up the game. Still, at a 4-player game, it took us around 3 hours to finish.
- Difficult to teach – While the rules of the game aren’t terribly difficult to grasp, there are many moving components of the game, so I don’t think this is a game I would want to play with new players too often.
- Component quality – While many components of the game were of good quality, the player boards were very thin and could have been made of thicker material.
- Lack of player interaction – If you enjoy games that are highly engaging with regards to player interaction, this may be a negative aspect of this game for you.
- Lack of apparent theme – How much importance you place on this will depend on your personal preference. For me, I didn’t mind the lack of theme, but others may find this game to be dry.
Final Thoughts
Cooper Island is a game that I was a little intimidated by at first glance. I typically enjoy games that are medium in weight, and don’t usually gravitate toward heavy games – but this one has managed to bring together some familiar mechanisms in a way that just made sense and worked really well.
The game was long, yes, but I love that I completely lost track of time while trying to piece together the puzzle of achieving helm points to try to win the game. Like I said earlier, this is a game I have continued thinking about afterward, and that to me is a sign of a solid game design.
The bottom line: If you enjoy heavy Euro games, I think Cooper Island is worth giving a try!
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