Note: This preview uses pre-release components and rules. What you see here may be different from the final, published game. This post was a paid preview, you can find out more information here.
The golden age of piracy is a fascinating historical period to me. Popular culture has romanticized these scoundrels into larger-than-life figures sailing the Caribbean and swashbuckling tales of adventure. They have captured the imagination of everyone from Robert E Howard to Jerry Bruckheimer in books and movies.
Today’s preview is a new board game on Kickstarter from Mighty Paladin Games for 1-4 scurvy dogs (players) aged 10 and up and plays in 20 minutes per player.
Gameplay Overview:
To start the game, each player rolls a die, and the highest roll gets to pick their captain first with other players selecting their captains going in clockwise order. The last player to select a captain gets to place their ship first with the other players following in counterclockwise order. Turns commence starting with the first player and going clockwise. Each captain starts with one treasure map card.
The goal of the game is to have five treasure maps and reach Skull Island.
Each turn a player can move and take an action based on where their anchor touches the seabed.
Moving is rolling a die of the color shown on their player board for navigation and moving that many spaces. You can move through merchant vessels and other players but not monsters, who are rude like that. Some spaces have numbers on them that represent the damage your ship will take moving through that space.
Actions depend on the space you end your movement in. If you stop on an island, you draw a treasure card and place a marker to show you’ve already looted the place. Meanwhile if you end in a space with another vessel or a monster you can battle.
Battling involves rolling the combat die of your weapons symbol and adding any modifiers. Your opponent may have abilities that reduce the damage. If the damage done is enough to defeat them, they go to Davey Jone’s locker and you get a reward (more on that in a bit, we’re still swashbuckling). If they’re not defeated, they get to fight back by rolling their attack die add and subtract any modifiers and the player takes the resultant value as damage. The battle wages back and forth until someone wins.
Rewards for Merchant vessels is a loot card which grants gold and notoriety. Monsters give the gold, notoriety, and treasure map listed on their tile (and you collect the tile to show that they’re defeated). For defeating another player you get all their gold, four notoriety (from the supply), and a treasure map (taken from the player). Treasure maps are also earned by defeating four merchants and visiting all five islands.
A player can avoid battle by parleying with other players and offer rewards to avoid combat or they can try and escape by each rolling their navigation die with the higher value winning. Meanwhile if their ship is blown out of the water, their ship miniature is removed and then at their next turn it’s placed at the port of their choice with their health set back to 10 plus any bonuses from their crew. On the positive side, you now have a three-turn truce with the player who sank you which prevents a single person from repeatedly beating up another player.
What’s a pirate to do with a damaged hull or one full of gold? Go to a pirate’s favorite wine: port. Port is where you can spend those ill-gotten gains. Gold can be spent on upgrading your vessel’s navigation and weapons die as well as maximum hull strength. Notoriety can be spent to upgrade your crew (for the costs listed) or clear the market at a cost of two. You can only have one crew member of each of the five color crew cards so players must strategize what crew they sail with. Lastly, your ship gets repaired.
At the end of each round the remaining merchant vessels advance to the next number on the board. After three rounds, a new year begins, an event card is drawn, and all merchant ships return to the 1 spaces. Some events are beneficial (Huzzah!) and some are hardships (boo! Hiss!), but such is the life of a pirate (Yo ho!).
The game continues until someone with five treasure maps can get to Skull
Island. But to do so, they must navigate through the Infinity Storm which does 15 damage, so your hull needs a minimum of 16 health to win.
Game Impressions:
Rogue Seas is a fun streamlined pirate adventure game with some light tableau building. You get to do pirate things and build up your ship and crew which allows you to be a better pirate. It’s accessible in both its mechanics and the theme. The art on the ship boards and cards helps bring the theme to the forecastle and I found myself humming the theatrical Pirates of the Caribbean theme as I played.
Now for the Leviathan in the room: Roll and move is often a derided mechanic in the hobby space, but it also works when there’s more to the game (See Thunder Road Vendetta as a prime example). In many roll and move games there’s only one path to advance along removing all player agency. In Rogue Seas there’s six options for each movement point. Thematically, I visualized lower movement values as rough seas or calm winds slowing my nautical progress. Mechanically, not being able to go where I wanted often made me change my plans to maximize my turns.
Balancing your short- and long-term objectives with whatever your movement die rolled drives interesting decisions. Do you go to port to buy crew or upgrades, or do you try to take down a merchant vessel or loot an island for treasure? You might be maxed out on cargo (coins) so drawing cards may only net notoriety but maybe that’s better than accomplishing nothing and is one ship closer to a treasure map. Meanwhile traveling further and wider to the five islands earns two treasure map cards. Once all five islands are visited, only the remaining four islands need to be visited to gain another two treasure maps.
Each year the merchant vessels get stronger encouraging players to upgrade their weapons through buying dice with coins or crew with notoriety. Players can opt to only fight merchant vessels and loot islands if they don’t want to attack other players, but the risk of player conflict always exists and tends to ramp up towards the end of the game as players look for that fifth treasure map or try to keep another player from winning.
Player interaction can also be parleying to avoid combat. And if you can’t escape or talk your way out of a fight, being defeated might be beneficial if it teleports you across the Caribbean to be closest to the last island you need to visit. As someone’s ship starts racing for the finish, they should expect to be attacked by other players. Meanwhile, maybe the ship that damaged you will be too weak to withstand another player’s attack before they can repair their ship, allowing you time to get back into the thick of things.
The solo mode has the player facing off against three randomly drawn pirate captains that are blocking three of the ports and have different stats and abilities, slightly changing the feel of each one. Other differences include the event cards offer a choice of two options that will happen each year and the Infinity Storm around skull island will gain in strength driving the need for higher hull strength up until the eighth and final turn which provides a timer that keeps the game feeling tight and tense.
Final Thoughts:
I was drawn to Rogue Seas by the cover art and theme. Rogue Seas gives me the piratical sailing adventure that I wanted to get from the Voyage Phase of Skull Tales. There’s a nice mix of player versus environment and player versus player which can either be direct conflict or open negotiation which should appeal to a broad range of players. I’ve really enjoyed my plays of Rogue Seas and am excited to see the campaign launch.
If what you’ve read sounds intriguing, be sure to check out their Kickstarter page for more details.
