Fireball Island

I had wanted to write about this topic for a while and my brother PJ gave me today the little piece of news that gave me the excuse to do so. Some of you who were children growing up in the 80s may remember a board game called Fireball Island. It was a huge, 3D board game that represented an island (duh!), at the center of which there was a volcano which mouth was also an idol, named Vul-Kar, which had a demonic face that threw fireballs (I guess bombs of lava, "personified" by red marbles). Next to this sinister figure was a jewel that our players were supposed to retrieve. It was not a very smart game: too much was due to chance, there was close to no strategy involved and there was so many pieces of material that everything quickly got lost. But all the same, we adored it.

What made this very flawed board game so compelling? What it lacked in game complexity, it made up in atmosphere and its imagery. Look at the box image for instance (on the top left). It's excessive, action-packed, dramatic. There was nothing in the rulebook about the island's history, who had built Vul-Kar (if he had been built at all), what was the jewel meant to represent and why our characters wanted it, but our wild imagination and our knowledge of Indiana Jones and King Kong (among other sources) could easily fill the many blanks. My brothers and I even ended up make belief games based on Fireball Island, when we fought evil cultists, pythons and other wild animals, while trying to dodge fireballs from Vul-Kar's mouth. It was that inspiring. And anyway, PJ told me today that they made a remake of the game. A more complex and intelligent version, where there is more strategy involved. It is modernized, but I am confident it has at least some of the timeless charm of the original. And I am very tempted to buy it just for kicks. Or maybe ask for it for Christmas.