Isle of Skye is a tile-laying game with auctioning to obtain the tiles you will be using to build your tableau. Placement rules are incredibly simple, you just have to match the terrain type, roads can lead to dead ends, but terrain must match. Speaking of terrain, there are only three types, grass, water and mountains. Each tile will display some of these in various configurations but also may have buildings, animals or other decorations that have point scoring potential.
Each round you will draw three tiles from a bag and place them in front of your player screen. Behind your screen you will assign two of the tiles a value from your own money, and mark one to be discarded. The key thing here is setting the price, as during the next phase you and the other players will choose whether or not to buy tiles from each other at the price set. The good news is that if another player does buy one of your tiles you get the money, the bad news is you may end up without tiles to place in your own tableau.
This creates an great game of cat and mouse as you play out various strategies, do you tempt players with low costing tiles you don’t want? Potentially giving them scoring opportunities or set your prices high on the tiles you want?
At the start of the game you will have randomly drawn four scoring tiles from a good selection, scoring happens at the end of each round but not every tile scores every round, meaning you have to play for immediate and longer term goals and at some point scoring tile A will not score again this game.
This variety adds to an already delightful game that works at every player count and is worthy of a place in any collection.
