Libertalia Board Game

I love this pirate theme game but I have yet to find anyone else who enjoys it enough to play it with me more than once meaning it mostly gathers dust on my shelf.In this game you are all given the same hand of pirates and have to chose one a day to place on the boat. The pirates are then ordered in rank from lowest to highest and you do the special ability on the card. Once everyone has played their special ability which could cause other pirates to leave the ship or for you to swap your card for a new one you deal out treasure which could be good or bad. Your pirate then leaves the ship to go in to your den, beware he may not stay and maybe killed off in a manner of ways depending on the card. Any cards in your den with a night time ability then use this. You do this for 6 days, the 7th day is the day of rest for three weeks and the richest pirate at the end is the winner!This game is part strategy, part memory and part luck. Some cards get discarded from your den if there is more than one den with them in so you have to remember who has played theirs already as you don't want to end up discarding your card because of someone else. It is also a guessing game as to who you think people will put out by looking at the treasure, if there is only one good treasure and a lot of bad then you know players will likely go for a higher ranking pirate to set out but are there pirates who can kill the highest ranking pirate on the ship in players hands....I think its a great game with fun mechanics but have found it is not to everyones taste. My son picked this game up with ease when he was 8yrs olf but it is too advanced for my daughter who is 6 even though she plays a lot of games with us.

This is an interesting, fun and addictive board game.The premise is that you are a pirate captain, and you want to retire - so are going on three more raids to try and get some booty. You have to compete with 1-5 other pirates though, who are going on the same raids.You pick a colour (black, white, blue, green, red and yellow), which corresponds to a set of cards, a den and a score counter. There is a board which is the ship, and a separate scoreboard. Someone (according to the rules the youngest player, but that gets boring after a while) selects nine random characters of the 30 available - and the other players all get the same nine characters. So in the first raid, all players have the same characters to play.Each raid lasts six days (not in real time - don't worry!), and each day has three phases - day, dusk and night. There are 30 different character cards, ranked 1 (Parrot) to 30 (Spanish Governor) of which you have nine to play with for each raid - different characters have different functions - for example, the Beggar has a daytime function, whereby the player who played the highest ranked card must give three doubloons to the person who played the beggar, the Cook has a dusk function of being able to take two booty tiles instead of one, and Granny Wata has a night function of gaining two doubloons. The day and dusk functions occur on the day the character is played, while the night functions occur each night. There are also end of raid functions, which either gain you or lose you doubloons.The booty tiles can be treasure -worth doubloons, cursed masks - which lose you doubloons, Spanish spies - which kill the character who takes them, or sabres - which allow the character to kill a character in another captain's den. There are the same number of booty tiles as players for each day of the raid, selected at random from a bag.At the end of the raid, you count up your doubloons, and that is your score. You will have (probably) three cards left at the end, so the next raid starts with the youngest player selecting another six cards for everyone to play with. The second and third raids are more interesting, as the players have different cards in their hands depending on what they have played in previous raids. The next raids continue as the first, at the end of each you add up your doubloons and add to your score. The person who has the most, wins.It is a fascinating game - there is a lot of thinking to do when choosing which character to play, depending on what booty tiles are available that day, what cards you have already played (e.g. the mutineer kills one of your own characters each night - so don't play him if you have cards you want to keep), what cards you think your opponent may play. It can be frustrating when you play the wrong thing, or when your carefully laid plan goes awry as someone else plays something unexpected. It is great fun though. I highly recommend it.

An absolutely brilliant game! So much fun. Great that it plays 6 players too as my group tends to hover around the 6 player mark.Can be played 2-6 but I think, for a really decent game, you need at least 3 or 4... mostly because you're constantly trying to stitch up your friends, so the more of you there are, the more fun it is!The components, while all card, are high quality. The artwork on the playing cards is lovely and not so subtle in how they've pinched the likenesses of famous folk (Elisha Cuthbert is blatantly the tavern woman) and the text is easy to understand.This gets pled regularly in my gaming group now and if we haven't planned out what we're playing that night in advance, I generally get asked if we can play this one. Couldn't praise the game enough!

All games will appeal differently to different people but there is no getting away from how clever and eminently replayable this game is. All players have the exact same set of cards as each other and there are no random elements and almost no hidden information. In essence, it is an auction game where you bid on loot, using the seniority of your crew members to determine who gets the first pick. However, each crew member can only be used once and there are lots of auctions to bid on.Each auction will contain different loot, some with more valuable pieces than others, some with cursed loot that will net you negative points, meaning you will want to plan ahead which auctions are more important to you. To make it more interesting still, not only does the seniority of your crew members determine the order of looting, but each one will have a special ability as well. Sometimes it pays to lose an auction simply to get a special ability into play, sometimes it is about winning the auction no matter the other consequences. Usually, it is a tough choice!Since all players consider and choose simultaneously, there is little downtime. The special abilities of the various crew members contain just the right amount of stabbing other players to make it personal. In short: I love it!