Ahoy!
How did 2023 start for you? For us it is pretty busy (suboptimal work-game balance)... and not much gaming yesterday. Let us share our almost single gaming experience of the holidays… which is mostly about driving between cities/countries to visit family and friends, so it can be quite exhausting 😪 Luckily we got to try something new - one of our presents, Ahoy, which we were very excited about! 😁
Ahoy is the newest asymmetrical competitive game from @ledergames . Two factions are fighting over control of tiles/islands, the 3rd and 4th players (if you have them) play as Smugglers, who don’t directly take part in the fighting. Everyone is trying to get the most fame points to win the game, they just have different tool sets to collect fame.
We need to play this a lot more to get the hang of it but are happy with our first impressions. The bad part is that playing 2p means you only get to play the 2 factions in a battle for control - so no smuggling 😶. But the other two factions are just perfect to have a really cool 2p area control game with asymmetric sides.
The game uses dice 🎲 worker placement which is a big favorite of mine - alongside basic actions, every faction has unique actions too. These might need specific values to activate. There is also a some tile-laying as you explore 🧭 the archipelago. Every tile has an island on it and some miscellaneous locations. If you visit islands you can use your gold to recruit crewmembers 🙋 with special abilities that allow you to hand tailor your strategy. As the map and your crew will always be different, I think the replayability is nice - especially with the dice rolls each round.
Combat is a bit of a mixed bag 😬 - during combat you just roll a die each and check who got the biggest value with modifiers. You can add values from cannon dice, but have to decide before rolling. This can be unfair sometimes, as you see your well-laid plans crumble. But because the game has a lot of fights, the randomness should balance itself out by the end, and games length shouldn’t be too long either.
We’ll go more into detail about the asymmetries in a future post! 🙃
