Shiver me timbers!

We were really excited to get an advance copy of 🏴‍☠️ Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay, and I can easily explain why in just two words: Pirate Euro ! 😁 Pirates are always one of the coolest themes, and this upcoming euro from Chilifox Games lets you do all kinds of piratey-swashbuckling things, like plundering villages 🏘️, digging up treasures 💎 and fighting monsters 🐙, and all this in a euro package. 😉

The gameplay is somewhat unusual, not just expected euro staples. 🧐 The big game board is basically a track for your pirate ships to move on, with adjacent land spaces of different types that you can invade with your pirate meeples. Every now and then a player ship will move across a reef which triggers a short event phase; Go through five reefs and the game is over. 

The core of the action selection each turn is easy: You pick 1 out of 3 possible actions, keeping in mind that you can’t choose the action from the previous turn 👉 so really you are choosing between 2 in any turn. But, there is an additional layer of card hand-management on top of this. Each turn you choose a card to play with your action, and cards have multiple aspects.

👥Top symbols matter for Recruiting. This is how many meeples you get and what stats you increase.
🗡️Bottom symbols are important when you do a Move & Shoot action. These are resources you generate depending on your movement.
🚩Each card also has a flag. Its color determines where you can go with your Invade action, and if you Recruit, the card gets added to your tableau which increases the amount of pirates you can invade with.

So these cards are multi-use with a bunch of different information on them. 😉 As you play you want to plan in advance for which areas you will visit and build up your flags accordingly, but you also need to have the right cards in hand when you get there. This is something to always keep in mind as you can only hold 3 cards.

The different regions you invade work in different ways, but each of your action brings you towards a singular goal: Have the most gold 💰 by the end of the game. Just like how a pirate game should be. 😁