It's tiny, but is it also epic?
In ☠️ Tiny Epic Pirates you command a tiny yet epic crew and ship with the goal of plundering booty from settlements and merchants ships and burying it on islands. If you manage to bury your 3rd treasure chest you win the game!
⚙️ The game is powered by a rondel action-selection system. Each turn you move your captain meeple on your action wheel that had actions randomly assigned to it during setup. You can go 1 step clockwise on your rondel or lay your deckhand meeples on action tiles to skip them, though this means they don’t do their assignments anymore that give you passive bonuses otherwise.
👉 You can pick up explore tokens, plunder booty cubes from settlements, attack other ships, hire crew, trade away your booty or hide out in coves. There is also a combo system powered by your crew cards - certain abilities may trigger depending on what you chose. Each map card of the randomly placed 4x4 grid only has two possible actions on it though, so you have to select your location wisely each turn.
⚔️ Combat involves rolling dice 🎲 and seeing if your crew has those values - add up the number of hits and have more than your enemy. You could even raise your legend tracker if you win, which can improve your speed or dice pool.
The main thing you do in the game is pick-up and deliver 🚚, as you gather booty cubes and go to the market to sell it. Each market only accepts one type of good though. Another twist here is that booty types each have a variable value. If someone sells a type, that one goes to the lowest value on the market board - this is also the main way of blocking players from getting money.
💬 We felt like battling each other and merchants didn’t give a high enough reward, considering you might lose and get nothing. So gathering and selling booty cubes was a much faster and safer way of getting gold fast, but that alone gets boring quickly. We tried to do a little bit of everything and we’ll have to test more focused strategies. 🤔
As usual with these games you get an insane amount of stuff packed into the tiny box. The components are good and the artwork and table presence of the game are really nice to look at. 😊
