by HolyGigi
The answer to that question is: well, it depends.Yes, its an awesome game!
I'll start with the obvious: the game looks superb. The map is amazing, all the action cards are beautiful and even the ships look good. Everytime I get a new player and bring out this game, the first reaction is always the same: wow that map looks nice!
Just by seeing the nicely done ships on that board and glancing over some of the Cargo cards helps a lot with the theme.
My only complaint is related to the player board. Its not bad, but its bland. Its like they forgot about the theme when they designed this. Dont get me wrong, its very functional and not that bad. It just looks bad when you compare it with the rest of the components.
The game plays quite fast once everyone knows what to do. There's not really a lot of downtime when you just sit and wait for someone to move.
Basically, you can do 3 things: move the ship, do port actions (like buying/selling cargo) and scouting for an enemy to engage. Moving the ship is instant, scouting takes about 10 seconds. Port actions my take longer and the fights are the most time consuming of all.
But even so, the fights in a 4 player game are not boring when you're not involved. Since the map is relatively small, you are always close to the action, so you want to pay attention to the other 2 guys since the winner may become a very juicy target for you on the next turn. I've seen a lot of games won by the player who engaged a stronger, but severely crippled opponent.
The theme is present throughout the game. From the game components to the funny rumors, or to the crazy missions you may acquire, they all fit the pirate theme realy realy well. One mention here, the theme is the idyllic pirate notion, - pirates of the caribbean - not the cruel reality of the day. And for a game, I think this is the best choice.
The RPG element is really well done. You get a captain with some fixed skills and one ability and a boat. The boat initially stats can be altered easy to suit your needs. Once you have enough wealth you can replace your entire ship and upgrade that one again. Also, the crew you gather from missions/rumors add quite a nice element to this. All this information can be seen at a glance.
The NPCs: usually I hate them in a board game, but here they are fun as hell. Since the way you control them is so easy and precise, they don't really feel like NPCs. They will always go for someone on the board and another player controls the battle so you actually want the NPCs to win and send your opponent to the bottom of the sea.
Although at first you may not see it (first few games) there is quite a lot of tactical thinking involved. Knowing how to use the NPCs in your favor, when to initiate a fight and when to let the big guys battle it out and then just crush the winner, all these small things really make the 3rd + game a lot more fun.
It's ok, but could be better
Combat: while it does make sense to me now, initially it felt very awkward and overly complicated. You have to declare an action, roll a number of dice based on a skill of your caption, check who of the 2 captains won the roll, see how many are hits, roll those dice again and see where they hit. Although, sometimes they may hit something or your opponent may choose what they hit. Also, there are some modifiers that allow you to "break" the rules. Needless to say, first few games we had our player aids (double sided A4 paper) with us at all times. And then there's crew combat... So the combat is not bad, but takes a bit of getting used to it before it becomes fun. I'd say at least one full game if all the players are beginners, or 3-4 battles if one of them knows the game.
Also, another thing I'm not too thrilled about is the luck factor in fights.
Winning conditions: I have a problem with the fact that you can get 5 victory points just by gathering 50 gold in your stash. I understand that this is for the "Merchants" players, but it makes the game feel like it ends abruptly. In my games, we changed it to 3 or even 0 sometimes, if we all go pirate (and this is usually the case).
Merchant battles: they are ok, don't get me wrong, but I just dont get why we have 2 totally different types of combat (pvp and p.v.merchants) Maybe its to save time, since merchant fights are way faster, but I still think this would have been better in another way. Dont know how, but
I dont like it
The setup: quite a long one, lots of different components that go in different places. This also makes it quite daunting for new players, when you keep adding different stacks of cards, different tokens, it does tend to look a bit intimidating.
The player board: I know I've said it before, but I really don't like it. Maybe if they made it in the form of a ship, or anything... The rest of the game looks so good and this doesn't really fit at all.
In conclusion
I'd recommend this game to players who enjoy conflicts, who have between 2 and 3 hours available and who don't mind learning quite a few rules. For them, this will be an awesome thematic experience that will always end in one way: "so, this game is done, now lets play it again so I can have my revenge!"
I wouldn't recommend it to families with small kids due to the complex rules, or to people who want to play a quick pirate game. Also, I wouldn't recommend it to people who get easily offended by having their friends turn on them.