Fireball Island Is Coming Back, And It's Bigger And Better Than Ever Before

We all became completely obsessed with the board game Fireball Island when we were kids.

The game has become one of those relics from our past that is now worth a good chunk of change. The board game itself is listed for hundreds of dollars online and while I love the game, I don't know that I could justify paying that much for it.

I mean, it's a classic, but I just can't justify it. Luckily for me, I won't have to. Because even though we all complain that everything old comes back, this time it's actually a good thing.

Fireball Island is coming back!

Fireball Island came out in 1986 and it became one of the most beloved board games of all time. It was an amazing adventure, and it took board games to a vertical level that no other game really had at that time.  

The point of the game was to escape the island with the jewel, but all the other players are going after the same thing. There are traps and obstacles you have to make through, but the last thing you want is to be hit by a fireball.

Personally, I always took issue with the "fake jewel" card. It seemed to be used against me every time I started to get ahead. Maybe that's what I've never been willing to spend the hundreds of dollars to experience that pain again.  

At least now I have a new chance to try a game that takes Fireball Island to the next level. The game is back, and it's bigger and better than ever...

The new board game was announced as a part of a kickstarter on April 3rd, 2018. They needed to raise $300,000 to commit to building the game, and they completely destroyed their goal within one hour of launching the campaign.

They've actually already received over $1 million in support for this sequel - raised in only two days!

The game is being made by Restoration Games which is a company that takes old favorites and updates them a bit, tweaking the rules to make it more exciting or interesting. I mean, Fireball Island was already pretty much the best, but their new version looks pretty awesome too!

The game brings all that excitement you remember experiencing when you were playing but it updates it with some new expansion packs and exciting additions.

The game designers are doing everything in their power to make this game everything you want it to be. They spoke to Polygon and revealed the struggles they faced.

“People have this very fond memory of this game, people remember it being even bigger and even taller and even faster,” Rob Daviau said. “So we had to somehow make it bigger and faster without making the box bigger. That was the first problem; it was an engineering problem.”

“Our goal is to capture the memory and the feeling but definitely modernize it”

“People have grown up — they want a little more out of a game." Daviau said. "Gaming tastes have changed; [people] want a little more control of their games now.”

The game is bigger than the original, roughly twice the size, but it comes apart into three separate pieces so you can store it away easily. They worked tirelessly with a clay model to make sure all the paths that the fireballs would take were predictable but faster than the original.

“We want people to be playing in this amusement park of marbles and trees and getting knocked over without ever thinking about how this will fit in the box,” Daviau said. “It was a strange sort of toy engineering puzzle that is very different from games I’m usually designing.”

Now that the game is funded, they will be adding some stretch goals to make it even better. There's an app that will be made to accompany the game, and a whole bunch of other things you can find on their Kickstarter page.

Even though I never won this game when I was young, I still loved it. I am ready to give it another try and I cannot wait to get mine! I absolutely want all of the expansion packs too. You can order everything for a pledge of $130, or just the base game for $60, and honestly you just can't go wrong with either.

If you're interested, check out their Kickstarter and we will see you at Vul-Kar!

H/T - Polygon / Kickstarter