A printable Forbidden Island flood log lives or dies on a tile nobody can reconstruct from memory, because the whole game is a cooperative race against an island that floods a little more every turn while the players argue about which tiles are safe. The game ended with an escape off Fool's Landing, and by the time the table argues about it nobody agrees on which tiles were flooded twice, which were shored up, or whether a treasure tile sank before its treasure was captured. A log sheet that records the floods as they happen is the only record that settles that argument, and it is a record no one at the table is keeping, because everyone is too busy watching the water rise.
Forbidden Island, for the seller who has never played it: two to four players, cooperating, on an island of 24 tiles laid out at random. Six tiles start flooded. Each turn a player takes up to three actions — move to an adjacent tile, shore up an adjacent flooded tile, give a treasure card to a player on the same tile, or capture a treasure — then draws two treasure cards, then draws flood cards equal to the current water level. A flood card on a dry tile floods it; a flood card on an already-flooded tile sinks it, and the tile leaves the board. A Waters Rise card raises the water level and shuffles the flood discards back into the deck, so flooded tiles come up again sooner. To capture a treasure, a player discards four matching treasure cards while standing on one of that treasure's two tiles. There are four treasures: the Earth Stone, the Crystal of Fire, the Statue of the Wind, and the Ocean's Chalice. The team wins only when all four treasures are captured, every player is on Fool's Landing, and someone plays a Helicopter Lift card to fly everyone off.
Here is the game the log is built for. Three players: Maya is the Pilot, Ben is the Engineer, and Carla is the Messenger. The water level starts at 2, so two flood cards are drawn after every turn. The six tiles flooded at setup are recorded on the log's first line, and one of them is Tidal Palace.
Early on, Ben shores up two tiles — Coral Palace and the Observatory — and the log records both shore-ups with the round number, because a shored-up tile is dry again and a later flood card on it only floods it, it does not sink it. Maya captures the first treasure: standing on the Temple of the Moon, she discards four Earth Stone cards and claims the Earth Stone. Carla captures the second: standing on the Cave of Embers, she discards four Crystal of Fire cards and claims the Crystal of Fire. Then a Waters Rise card is drawn, the water level goes from 2 to 3, the flood discards are shuffled back in, and from then on three flood cards are drawn after every turn instead of two. That is the moment the log starts earning its keep, because the shuffled discards mean already-flooded tiles are back in the deck.
In the later rounds, Tidal Palace comes up in the flood deck a second time. Nobody shored it up in between — the log's shore-up column has no entry for Tidal Palace at all — so Tidal Palace sinks and leaves the board. Ben captures the third treasure that same stretch: standing on the Whispering Garden, he discards four Statue of the Wind cards and claims the Statue of the Wind. Maya captures the fourth: standing on the Coral Palace she shored up earlier, she discards four Ocean's Chalice cards and claims the Ocean's Chalice. Four treasures, sixteen treasure cards discarded in total, four captures, each on the right tile. All three players move to Fool's Landing, Carla plays the Helicopter Lift card, and the team escapes.
Now picture the same table without the log. Ben insists Tidal Palace was shored up before its second flood, which would mean it only flooded again instead of sinking — and if it sank, he argues, the game should have been lost, because a sunken tile changes the whole board. The log says otherwise: Tidal Palace was flooded at setup, never appears in the shore-up column, and its second flood is recorded in the round it sank. Carla insists the water level was still 2 when the last flood draws happened, which would mean one fewer flood card per turn and a different board entirely. The log says the Waters Rise was drawn before those turns, the level was 3, and three cards were drawn each time. Ana is not at this table — there are only three players — and nobody can claim otherwise, because the log lists exactly three names. The game has no record of any of it, because flood cards are drawn, resolved, and discarded, and a tile that sinks is simply gone. A printable flood log fixes exactly this: one line per flood draw — which tile, flooded or sunk, which round — one column for shore-ups, one line per treasure capture with the four cards discarded, and a footer for the final tally. The buyer fills it in as the flood cards come out, and when the argument starts, the sheet, not the loudest voice, wins.
That is also why the log has to be designed for speed, not beauty. A turn moves fast and the flood step comes at the end of every turn, so nobody will fill in a form with ten fields per tile. The sheet that works is one line per flood card, one line per shore-up, and one line per capture, with a row of boxes for the four treasures — four boxes, four checked, at the escape. Anything fancier gets abandoned mid-game, and an abandoned log is worse than no log, because the buyer blames the sheet for slowing the game down. The seller's job is to make the sheet disappear into the game: big handwriting lines, no decoration in the writing area, and the flood record as a simple table, not a paragraph.
The honest limits matter, and the listing should say them plainly. A log will not make anyone better at deciding which tile to shore up, which is the actual skill of the game — it is a record, not a strategy guide, and a buyer who expects it to teach them to win will be disappointed. It will not resolve the argument about whether a tile "should" have been shored up, because that is a judgment call no sheet can make; what it resolves is the factual argument — which tiles flooded, which sank, who shored up what, which treasures were captured. And it only works if one person at the table actually writes during the flood step, which means the seller should pitch it as a job for the scorekeeper, not as something everyone does at once. A group that will not pause for five seconds per flood card will not get value from it.
The pitch to a seller is simple: Forbidden Island's best moment is the post-game argument about the tile that sank or the treasure that was captured just in time, and the argument is the one part of the game that leaves no record. A printable flood log is the record. Price it like a party-game accessory, not a textbook — a few dollars for a pack the buyer prints forever — and the buyer who argues about a sunk tile will come back for the next pack when the next game night needs one.
Disclaimer: an unofficial fan-made log sheet for Forbidden Island. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the game's publisher. The game itself, its tiles, and cards are sold separately.
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