Drink Up, Me Hearties! It’s Time For Adventure With These Five Pirate Themed Board Games
Grab your tricorne and batten the hatches! Here be five pirate themed board games worth their weight in gold.
Tiny Epic Pirates
I’ve been a big fan of the Tiny Epic series for a long time. My collection includes Tiny Epic Tactics, Tiny Epic Dungeons, and Ultra Tiny Epic Kingdoms. While I currently have my eye on Tiny Epic Game of Thrones, one that’s always seemed like it would be great for me is Tiny Epic Pirates.
Tiny Epic Pirates is a board game about plundering booty (no jokes, please). The main system of the game is the Captain’s Orders, which is a wheel showing the order of actions players will take on each of their turns. However, with careful planning and use of deckhands, players can skip certain actions in order to get to better ones sooner. However, unused deckhands provide bonuses to the ship. So action selection becomes a valuable part of resource management and careful planning.
Pirates of Maracaibo
Pirates of Maracaibo is a stand-alone game in the same franchise as the game Maracaibo. But this time it leans a little more into the pirate-y parts of the board game. If you know both games, you’ll see a lot of the same ideas in both, but they are overall pretty different.
Sail your ship around the Caribbean in order to find the best treasure! It’s important to find a safe harbor to bury your precious gold, rare emeralds, and iridescent pearls. Along the way you’ll hire crew, and commandeer rival ships, to become the greatest pirate of Maracaibo.
Sea of Thieves: Voyage of Legends
I’ve spoken about Sea of Thieves: Voyage of Legends before. It’s a fantastic representation of the video game it’s based on. Plus, it’s a game that scales really well. You start with a meager crew and ship, but as you find loot, battle monsters and each other, you’ll gain specialist crew and bigger ships.
Like the video game, you can take on quests from various people in order to gain bigger rewards. The difficulty of the quests is up to you, but bigger rewards come with bigger risk. Plus, battling the Megalodon or Skeleton Fort are separate mini-games that are a surefire way to make your voyage truly legendary.
Dead Men Tell No Tales
If I ever made a list of the top 5 board game box arts, Dead Men Tell No Tales would absolutely be on that list. Even if I never played the game again, I would 100% get this set up mounted on my wall as a piece of art. Shout out to WallZap.
Sick art aside, Dead Men Tell No Tales is a cooperative game that uses a shared pool of action points for all players. Players can pass their available actions to each other in order to make best use of them while scouring a burning ship for treasure. The ship is built during the game, not unlike Betrayal. As the ship burns, players must quickly carry the loot out of the ship in order to secure their booty, lest the blaze lock them into a briny fate.
Tortuga 2199
Despite by deep love for robots and machines in general, given the option, I’ll usually opt for historic or fantasy over sci-fi. But since they keep making more Star Wars movies and TV Shows, and Our Flag Means Death got cancelled, clearly I’m in the minority. So, this last pirate board game’s for you.
Tortuga 2199 combines exploring a modular map with deck building to create a highly dynamic game. But it’s as much a deck builder game as it is an area control game. You’ll battle your rivals, explore new territory, gather loot from distant worlds and outfit your ship with upgrades and specialized crew members. It’s like Treasure Planet, the most underrated animated sci-fi movie ever made, next to Titan A.E.
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