I’ve always taken people’s criticisms of Feld’s designs as “soulless Euros” or “dry cube-pushers” with a grain of salt and roll of the eyes, but games like La Isla make it all too apparent there’s a kernel of truth to such disparaging remarks. This is a game with no attention paid to anything other than making a bunch of little systems talk to each other. It has no theme, no narrative, no player interaction, no meta, and only the thinnest veneer of strategy. It is also one of the most repetitive games I’ve ever played. Your turns are indistinguishable from each other. You do the same actions in the same order every single round. A designer with a smaller pedigree would’ve never gotten this published, at least not without a pretty significant overhaul. La Isla‘s flaws are way too obvious and way too severe. Hey, at least that means this should be a quick review! La Isla is a card game about capturing endangered animals on an island. You start by setting up the island and distributing 5 different species of creatures randomly across the board. Each creature space is bounded by 2-4 player spaces that you will be placing workers into to surround and capture them. Every turn, players draw 3 cards and assign them to 1 of 3 actions. One will be used to learn its pictured ability, one will be used to take its pictured resource, and one will be used to increase the point value of its pictured animal species.…