Cardboard Corner: Review of Fireball Island

For those unaware, I am an American living in Poland. Slowly but surely, I have transported all 500+ of my CDs across the Atlantic. (Yes, I’m also a middle-aged American—a music loving middle-aged American.) Every visit to the family or business trip, I would stick a few dozen in my luggage, and eventually they were all brought here. A couple years ago I became even more ambitious: to transport my copy of Fireball Island across the Atlantic.*

For the unaware, Fireball Island’s board is a single, solid, very colorful, 3D piece of plastic about the size and shape of a kitchen sink, but with less depth. It cannot be folded neatly and transported as any other board game might. Why it can’t be folded, you ask? So the marble fireballs have sturdy ground to roll and smash you, of course.

Fireball Island is a classic Indiana Jones scene. It features a number of trails and caves which lead to the top of a volcano where a jewel, guarded by a mythic being, is waiting to be captured and carried away to a waiting boat. The first player to get to the boat with the jewel, wins. The fighting and backstabbing to get the jewel, the wobbly bridges and getting lost in caves are not the biggest problems, however. Hanging over every move and turn are the fireballs waiting to crash down upon players and knock them (temporarily) out of the game. Given fireballs roll whenever players roll a 1 means it’s not a question of if, rather when.

There are some people who may believe Fireball Island is merely a roll and move game. And to a large degree it is. Indeed, at the beginning of their turn players roll a standard 6-sided die to determine how far they are able to move their little figure on the trails toward the jewel and escape. But having played the game many times, I can say Fireball Island is equally card-driven. Card powers giving players the ability to change the state of the game in a large variety of ways, not everything is determined by the numbers 1-6. In fact, the last twenty or so spaces before the escape boat are some of the most fought over territory in the game. The player who gets to those spaces first with the jewel is rarely the winner given all the tricks that can be played with the cards and fireballs. Combine this with the randomness of the dice and you’ve got a tense, exciting finish.

My version of Fireball Island is from the 1980s. I have seen there was a remake made a few years ago, Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul Kar, to bring the game up to date with modern standards of gaming. I have not played it, but I don’t doubt it has evolved while retaining the spirit. That being said, Fireball Island the original, if you can get your hands on it, offers 20-30 minutes of cutthroat, every person for themselves, knife fight in a phone booth type of family <devil face> fun. The die will undoubtedly leave some people hanging, wishing for more luck. But played a few times, that level of luck quickly evens out, and what’s left is a mix of happiness and frustration, and above all, fun, tension, and adventure.

If I had one gripe about the game, it would be that the fireballs don’t always “do what they should do and roll all the way down their chute”. They get clogged up rolling down chutes. Unless measures are taken before the game, this can result in disagreement among players. For example, we made a house rule that if a player was standing on a fireball’s route, then they would be smashed, regardless if the fireball actually touched them or not. As each route is clearly defined in the rules, this helped dispel the disagreements. Otherwise, it’s entirely possible for a fireball marble to get clogged up on the first person it hits, and not take out the remaining players standing on the same route that it ordinarily would.

In the end, Fireball Island is not the greatest game ever made. But it is a splash of quick, cutthroat fun that looks fantastic on the table. Rolling the marbles, spilling people into the ravine, and narrowly avoiding fireballs feels great on the 3D surface. 1 minute to set up and 5 minutes to teach and learn, the only real problems people may have with the game is the degree of luck inherent to dice rolling and card draw. Accept that, however, and you’re on your way to jungle volcano, Indiana Jones adventure. Now, how to get my old Pontiac 6000 across the Atlantic…

*Notes: Firstly, as a child I lost one of the four figurines which come with Fireball Island. If anybody knows where I can get a replacement, I would be grateful. Secondly, transporting the game to Poland was a matter of gently flattening the game box at the bottom of our hard shell luggage, placing some clothes into a bowl shape on top of it (dirty clothes at the end of a trip worked great), putting the game board in upside down, then filling the board with the rest of my clothes and things, including the few game pieces. It worked perfectly, no damage done en route.