A 2-act dice chucker

One of the best themes in gaming might be pirates 🏴‍☠️, so I am always happy to see new pirate games coming out. And this is also why I was looking forward to trying Davy’ Jones Locker: The Kraken Wakes, which is a co-op pirate game for 1-4 players just arriving from Kickstarter. You usually shoot each other or try to see who can become the most infamous pirate, so it’s interesting to see a co-operative take on the theme. And there are some cool ideas here.

A game is split into two Acts. Act 1 involves you sailing around, searching for treasure, hunting trade galleons and buying crew and upgrades for your ship, right until you arrive at Act 2: which is a boss fight against a monstrous Kraken! 🐙 To win, at least one of you has to survive and defeat the Kraken.

In Act 1 everyone takes 3 actions each round, basically trying to prepare for the upcoming fight. Many rules make you travel from island to island, so you spend time out at open sea, which involves drawing cards - plus several other actions also involve drawing cards from specific decks. These events are resolved by rolling dice - your ships have a Sail, Hull, Repair and Attack stat, that determine how many dice you get to roll. These stats can increase and decrease as you play. You play like this until the Act 2 condition is triggered.

With the arrival of Act 2 you flip the board - now instead of an archipelago, you see a huge whirlpool 🌀 with a Kraken in the middle, and the boss fight begins!
Each round you will be drawing a whirlpool card which determines the current which pushes you and also makes movement harder. The Kraken itself will attack certain zones of the board, and it also has tentacles that come for you. You win by getting the Kraken’s life to zero, before all of you perish. ☠️

There is a fun solution for player elimination: if someone’s ship sinks, your deckhands can be rescued. 🏊 From then on, you no longer have your ship, but can move your deckhands on your friend’s ship and take helpful actions to steer yourself to victory.

We will have to come back with a future post with more thoughts!