The definitive pirate game

It was so nice getting back to playing 🏴‍☠️ Dead Reckoning again! 🤩 This pirate euro has such a beautiful and sprawling table presence and exquisite components, playing it feels like treating yourself to a high-class restaurant visit. 😁 The main selling point is the theme itself, plus it uses the signature John D. Clair mechanic: Card-Crafting. 👉 Instead of standard deck building, you keep your same 12 card deck for the whole game, but your cards themselves become stronger thanks to transparent overlays with additional effects that you slide into their sleeves. Each round you can also upgrade a card by flipping it over to a higher level, improving its base ability.

The game is a race to earn at least 4 achievements faster than your opponents, though this is followed by a scoring, so you need to have the most victory points to win.

Each turn you sail around the map, play cards and use their icons for actions. 🧐 You’ll mainly put influence cubes on the different islands, produce and load resources from them, and buy advancements from the map (which you can add to cards). 

With your cards later you can also add buildings to islands you control or upgrade your ship with new tiles, adding additional cargo capacity, cannons or sails. At its core the game is mainly about area control, trying to hold on to many islands and effectively upgrading cards to have some synergistic strengths. The card play makes it all really fun!

And of course with a pirate game, some ship battles and cannon fire cannot be absent: ⚔️ This infuses a bit of ameri into the otherwise euro game mechanisms. Luckily it's not dice rolls, instead you get a cube tower, which is a cool cardboard ship. ⛵ During battle you calculate how many cannon icons players have, and throw in both attacker and defender cubes, and evaluate their effects depending on where they land. You can earn crowns to win the battle, do damage to the opposing ship, or plunder cargo and gold. It's quick, it's punchy, it fits the theme and is quite random 🤭.

If you are looking for the quintessential pirate game, this might be it. 😉