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.
This one’s on me.
The Four Doors (2025, Happy Camper) was one of my most anticipated games of Gen Con 2025. The reasoning was simple: any game designed by Matt Leacock is getting to the table and deserves pre-release celebration. I’ve never really played a bad Leacock game. The Four Doors credits not just Leacock, but two other designers: Matt Riddle and Ben Pinchback, the men behind the breezy River Valley Glassworks as well as Beyond the Horizon, the Beyond the Sun update released by Capstone Games in the US last year.
Despite knowing nothing about The Four Doors beyond the cover and the designers, I was excited. Also, Happy Camper has given us three solid card games, Trio (the reprint of the exceptional card game nana), combo (a cooperative / competitive poker game) and Jungo, a game that landed so well at home that my family shopped it to in-laws during a recent beach trip. My gut was telling me that the stars were aligned.
Then I got The Four Doors to the table. I don’t really have any notes about the design, because as a game, I think The Four Doors is in line with similar Leacock designs. My issue with The Four Doors is that I should have investigated the fact that The Four Doors is simply another Forbidden Island clone. I just took a look in my game closet, and I’m all full up on games in The Matt Leacock Cooperative Hand Management System.
Let’s Talk
Since I’m the only one keeping score in this article, here’s where we are at:
- Pandemic (a cooperative hand management game designed by Matt Leacock) is probably the first co-op game I played in volume after getting into hobby gaming. I don’t track plays closely, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I have played Pandemic at least 30 times. The system is great, and it’s a game that I would probably still play if someone new to gaming put it in front of me on a game night.
- Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is still the best campaign experience I have ever had. As you have probably guessed, Pandemic Legacy is a cooperative hand management game designed by Matt Leacock, and to finish that campaign, including some of the games we lost to get to the finish, we played that one maybe 15 times. We kept character cards killed off during that campaign on our refrigerator for a couple years after we finished that campaign.
- Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 was very good, but I don’t know how it ended because the couple we were playing with literally separated and later divorced during our plays. (I swear that it wasn’t my fault.) You won’t believe this, but Pandemic Legacy: Season 0 is also a cooperative hand management game designed by Matt Leacock. Even though we aborted that play, we still did maybe a dozen games of that before calling it off.
- Forbidden Island is—wait for it—a cooperative hand management game designed by Matt Leacock. My now-11-year-old still breaks out Forbidden Island a couple times a year, but we have probably played that as a family 25+ times. Using a simpler system than the Pandemic games but still, in essence, a firefighting race against the clock, Forbidden Island spawned at least three sequels, Forbidden Desert, Forbidden Sky, and Forbidden Jungle. I am told that while those sequels do have some iterative changes to the base game’s formula, they are essentially Forbidden Island in other places.
All in, I think I have played cooperative hand management games designed by Matt Leacock over a hundred times, easy. (I haven’t even played Daybreak!) This obviously means I think the systems are at least pretty good, right? And, now that I have met Matt a couple times at shows (he is one of the nicest people in a hobby full of very friendly people, so this is saying something), I would say to him what I am saying to you and the world in general: if he didn’t design a single other cooperative hand management game, his legacy is bulletproof. He introduced a system to the world that works so well I still don’t think anyone has come close to beating out what Pandemic has done for cooperative gaming, full stop.
Which brings us to the question I’ve been asking since I finished my fourth play of The Four Doors: why does this new version of the system exist?
The Distinct Scent of…Money
The Four Doors is, for almost all intents and purposes, Forbidden Island. Players manage a hand of cards, work together to collect sets that will be spent in groups of four to recover relics, use their individual player power to help the greater good, and fight fires by “illuminating” certain sections of the board to remove threats. At the end of every player’s turn, new threats are added to locations, making it harder to keep those fires managed.
The relics (which are, sadly, not physical tokens in The Four Doors, but simple cards instead) do grant ongoing powers here once secured, to be used as actions on a player’s turn. The Four Doors does play solo and it does accommodate five players, so those are changes from how Forbidden Island played. (Any time I am doing a co-op game, I sometimes just play by myself and manage multiple characters. But The Four Doors has some solo-only rules and changes some of the character and relic powers for solo, so there is a legit solo mode here.)
Some of the individual spell cards (think Sandbags from Forbidden Island) are interesting, and the way the draw deck shrinks was, I guess, another “hrmph” moment when my wife and I nodded that we liked something, but not quite enough to say “wow.”
But otherwise, The Four Doors is Forbidden Island, or a more streamlined version of Leacock’s Pandemic system.
The fact that The Four Doors is a card-only version of the game (save for the small wooden pawns that are used in Forbidden Island, which easily fit into the small box) might make you say that this is the right move for budget-challenged players who want in on the Forbidden Island system. However, just opening my browser while writing this article shows that you can get Forbidden Island or The Four Doors for about $20. So, I can’t recommend The Four Doors for the value proposition either!
That leaves The Four Doors in a tricky place. I did a couple plays on my own, and I did a play with my wife and eight-year-old to try out the system. The 11-year-old took one look at the game and decided they didn’t need to play The Four Doors because they knew Forbidden Island was their preferred game. The rest of the family had fun while playing, but it wasn’t as much fun as flipping tiles and managing sunken parts of the island like you can do in Forbidden Island.
If you have never played any of the other games mentioned in this article, The Four Doors is worth a look. But for anyone else—and certainly anyone who already has, say, Forbidden Island, Pandemic, or both—stick with the games you already have at home. The Four Doors doesn’t do enough to justify another purchase.
The broader question I have is tied to future cooperative hand management games designed by Matt Leacock. Leacock, to me, is approaching Klaus Teuber territory; at some point, I began to sour on the 15th or 20th CATAN game. For Leacock, at what point does he say no to, say, “Forbidden Grocery Store” or “Pandemic Legacy: Season Zeta”? Maybe never, if the money is right, but as a consumer, I’m just not sure this system needs additional tweaks to keep it relevant. The original games are so good and so timeless that I can’t quite figure out how designs that are so similar in nature motivate the continued push.
The Four Doors details
- Designer: Ben Pinchback, Matt Leacock, Matt Riddle
- Artists: Asher Israel, Zachary Hoel
- Publishers: Happy Camper
- Release Date: 2025
- Player count : 1 - 5
- Age range : 10+
- Time range : 30 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Cooperative Game, Multi-Use Cards, Variable Player Powers
- BGG Geek Rating: 6.77826 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 3.5.
- More articles about The Four Doors.
