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(http://www.spiritgames.co.uk/image/comgames/5071.jpg)

Forbidden Island is a family game or light filler of daring do.

A purely co-op game, each player takes on the role of a randomly chosen character desperately searching for four elemental treasures scattered around a sinking island. Luckily it's sinking quite slowly and in the best tradition of little Dutch boys with thumbs the land seems pretty easy to drain again – makes you wonder why the locals didn't try it themselves.

If the players can find all the treasures and escape from the helicopter landing pad then it's all good and the island can sink for all they care the mercenary lot.

Many of the mechanics are borrowed from Pandemic in a slightly simplified form and anyone who has played the older game from the same designer will be right at home here.

At the start of the game the board is randomly generated and just as quickly randomly sunk in part. The players collect treasure by playing four matching treasure cards at one of the two possible locations with that icon printed on it. If at any point those two tiles or the exit tile is gone from the board then the game ends in defeat for the players.

After each turn cards are drawn and more tiles are sunk and if a Water's Rise! card is drawn the water level moves upwards. Get to the end of the level and it's game over too. The higher the water level the more cards are sunk each turn. Sunken tiles can be rescued by shoring them up but if you draw a card already sunk then it is permanently removed from  the game.

So it becomes a game of managing risk, trying to protect the treasure spaces and your route around the island while collecting the cards together. Just like Pandemic you can only trade cards while on the same space so hand and location management is vital.

It comes in a natty metal box and has some evocative art on the tiles. The sculpted treasures are nice but utterly pointless (cards would have done just as well) and the treasure cards are a little too thin for my liking, one is already dog-eared after one solo runthrough. This might be the first game I sleeve since they see a lot of use throughout.

Right now it seems like a quick and light version of Pandemic (playing in about 30 mins). My worry right now is that it's simply a slightly anaemic version of that game but I'll update this review when I've had a chance to play it or if anyone else has played it feel free to chime in.

I think the difference with this one compared to Pandemic, is it's aimed much more definitely towards the family market.

Play with the kids/nephews/nieces, and you'll find they're far more interested in gathering treasures from "Tidal Palace" than they are in eradicating smallpox from the far east.  ;)