Isle of Night isn’t here to blow your hair back. It also isn’t here to reinvent the wheel, make your day, or even dress to impress. Designed by Dustin Dowdle and illustrated by Ryan Laukat — right, that’s why it looks so familiar — this is a set collection game with a few good ideas rattling around its head. Unfortunately, they largely aren’t capitalized on.

Some of the things you might find on the Isle of Night.

Welcome to the Isle of Night, an isle that only surfaces at night. Don’t worry, you can now forget about the whole “nocturnal island” thing. Isle of Night certainly does. Its sole thematic linkage is that a session might end rather suddenly. In the limited hours minutes before the place gets too moist to support human life, your goal is to collect as much treasure as possible. Also dragons and serpents. Also bugs for some reason. Etymology reasons.

Okay, so Isle of Night isn’t going to be winning any awards for its setting. As a set collection game, though, it offers three wrinkles that keep its head above water.

The first has everything to do with how cards are collected. Rather than selecting one card at a time, players are free to pick up every single instance of that card. Turns are about drawing a few cards, adding them to the pile in the middle of the table, and selecting one type. If there’s only one of that card, you get it. If there are ten? Don’t hold your breath. Cards get nabbed long before that. But if there are that many, you grab the whole stack at once.

This adds some bite to what would otherwise be a fairly rote process. Even if you aren’t trying to collect spiders, the sudden appearance of five spider cards can present an unusual opportunity. This extends to other card types as well. Dragons and serpents, for example, can only be collected by picking up swords and spears, forcing players to think opportunistically. Staves are powerful, but also force you to discard something else you’ve collected. Cursed rings subtract points, but make it easier to tailor your collection over multiple rounds.

The scoring rubric keeps things spicy.

Meanwhile, the actual value of these cards is negotiable. Oh, some cards are straightforward. Say, two points for a treasure chest or one per lantern. But others are tied to a rubric that’s randomized with each session. Three butterflies might be worth five points now, but zero points the next time you play.

Crucially, that rubric is subject to change. When someone collects a conch, they get to swap two adjacent scoring cards, altering their value. It’s minor, not prone to big swings or profound drama, but this does help players tweak the merits of their collection on the fly. You know, provided they’re willing to grab some conchs rather than something else.

The final wrinkle is that you can’t be sure when the game will end. Lanterns dictate when the Isle of Night retreats into the sea, but these are items like any other and must be collected as such. This turns the whole thing into a testy event and incentivizes canny players to bring the game to a halt at the exact moment they’re in the lead.

Okay, so here’s the thing about Isle of Night. It’s clever. It’s beautiful. It’s smart, even. But it lacks the necessary pepper to stand out in a crowded genre. Unlike most of the titles published by Red Raven, there’s very little sense of wonder to this place you’re ostensibly exploring. Occasional cards shake up the formula, altering the scoring possibilities for a single player, but these are few and far between, not to mention muted in their effects. Similarly, the set collection and deck-plumbing keep their score thresholds reined in, keeping any potential drama or thrills at bay.

For such a tiny game, Isle of Night sprawls out.

Put another way, Isle of Night isn’t bad, but neither is it especially worthwhile. Once or twice per game, a player might hit upon a set that elicits some excited fidgeting. More often, it prompts yawns. In what might be its principal nod to the setting, the result is a game that feels too much like sleepwalking. It’s small, simple, and affordable. It would have benefited from some clanging pots and sunny beaches.

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A complimentary copy of Isle of Night was provided by the designer.