Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
After doing two plays of the 2025 family-weight card title Mooki Island (one play with my 12-year-old, then a play with my 9-year-old), I’m very sure of one thing: the artwork is the main reason for checking out the title.
That’s because the game itself is barely a game at all. The box hints at this as well, given that it believes it is “perfect for ages 4-10”; now that I’ve done plays, I absolutely recommend Mooki Island for a four- or five-year old child to play with an adult.
Here’s the entire game: a deck of 36 double-sided tarot cards is shuffled and split in half, creating two draw piles. There are five suits of Mookies (Sun, Moon, Fossil, Leaf, and Seashell), and there are also seven spiders in the deck. There are also five “legendary” mookies in the deck, one per suit, for the 72 total options spread across the deck.
On a turn, a player takes one of the two face-up cards, looks at both sides, then decides how to place it into their single personal scoring pile. If a spider is drawn and played, it must be played on an opponent’s scoring pile. (Spider cards always feature a spider on one side and a Mooki on the other.)
Once a card is placed, it can’t be flipped again later. When all but one card has been drawn, the game is over. Whoever has the most symbols of each suit (one for a standard Mooki, two symbols for a legendary) gets a trophy worth 2-4 points. And whoever has the most spiders must discard one of their trophies. High score wins…and, in case of a tie, the youngest player (who also went first) wins.
My game with the 12-year-old ended in a tie, and depending on your perspective, the tiebreaker feels really sheisty. It feels like an advantage to go first, especially if one of the first two cards is flipped to a legendary Mooki (worth double the value of a regular ol’ Mooki).
Still, there’s not much to think through here. The Sun and Moon tokens are worth more than the other trophies, so going for those always makes sense, and if you can gift a spider to your opponent, you are going to do that as well as long as the total spider count is in doubt (the first player to reach four spiders is automatically going to earn the spider majority, forcing them to lose a trophy during final scoring).
But the card art by the artist Seppyo (Mélanie Bardin) is gorgeous. After each play, I was surprised to find myself sorting and staring at the cards, and the range of “friends” from the Mooki families is something else. In another nod to its family-friendly nature, players are encouraged to name up to three of the Mooki characters after each play on a separate Mooki poster included in the game’s tidy box.
Mooki Island is cute, it’s cuddly, and it is certainly fast, with both plays lasting less than 10 minutes each, perfect for keeping the attention of a five-year-old child. But as a game, I don’t recommend Mooki Island beyond plays with very young children.
Mooki Island details
- Designer: Florian Sirieix
- Artists: Seppyo (Mélanie Bardin)
- Publishers: Scorpion Masqué
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 2
- Age range : 4+
- Time range : 10 minutes
- Mechanism(s): End Game Bonuses, Memory, Open Drafting, Set Collection, Take That
- BGG Geek Rating: 7.32727 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about Mooki Island.
