A player can never have more than 4 treasure cards in play at a time. If a player would ever put a 5th card into play, they must first discard an existing treasure or they may choose to discard the new treasure. Supplies +1 for each card discarded in this way.

Players can only use discard effects during their turn (when resolving an action during the action phase) unless otherwise instructed on the card. You can bury your treasure cards to increase your pirate's legacy, or keep them around for their helpful effects (and funny descriptions). | Image credit: Charlie Theel

Steamforged’s Sea of Thieves board game, Sea of Thieves: Voyage of Legends, tasks you with becoming the most famous pirate on the seven seas, but how you achieve that goal is up to you. Will you scrap with skeleton kings, complete missions, trade in treasures, or just get in the way of your friends, and shoot their ships full of holes? Wow, what an experience. I had heard how much fun this game is! I was not expecting it to be so well designed, well implemented and such a breeze to manage so many moving parts. Each story is different, each playthrough different and in every game, we came away with stories we talked about long after we finished playing. Forgotten Waters is great for kids, great for families and barring a few naughty words, which you can read ahead to negate, my boys were hooked. Haha, hooked, I really should not do pirate puns. Each time the ship would move onto an empty space (a space without a navigation or special location token on it) draw a navigation token and place it face up on that space before moving onto it. As of writing, there are five missions to undertake. Each taking around four hours give or take and depending on your crew. What is very clever though, is that you can save your progress at the half-way point of each mission and the app and added sheets make easy work of recording where you are in your adventure. We played our missions in two-hour spurts and found the time-frame perfect. Our games have Forgotten Waters have been both fun and engaging, which was a sigh of relief after the experience we had with Gen7. That being said, I will point out that this game absolutely works better at the higher end of the player count. Ideally, you’ll want at least four players for this game (it goes up to 7). Three players works OK, but below that you’ll be using some variants and the game will also lose a bit of its charm. So be aware of typically have a small group. Final Thoughts:

If the game has a big fan response, I would love to modify the tool we used to write the JSON files that feed the app. This is a “wait and see” feature, though. WHY AN APP? Assign each of the following roles/responsibilities to the players. Each player must have at least 1 role. If playing with fewer than 7 players, some players will need to take on multiple roles. Since becoming an indie publisher once again, Plaid Hat has announced several upcoming board games, including a new edition of Summoner Wars, a new board game from Mice and Mystics designer Jerry Hawthorne and a possible revival of expandable card game Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn.

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Ever since publisher Plaid Hat Games released Dead of Winter in 2014, I’ve been curious to see where they could take their Crossroads system. It was a clever mechanic that helped bring players into the narrative of the game with events tailored to things happening during the game. Their second iteration of it, Gen7, turned out to be a flop in eyes of our BGQ reviewer. But now, the crossroads system has not only taken off into a new and interesting direction, but it’s been excellently wrapped into a pirate theme (one of my favorites).

So your lot moves into a new space on the board and it’s a little island with a number. Everything in this game has a number. You take that digit and punch it into the Forgotten Waters companion app. Yes, Luddites must walk the plank and ignore this game entirely if that’s a dealbreaker as this electronic aspect is required.First, the price was coming out higher than we wanted it. Second, the event books were getting longer and longer as we filled out the content and saw just how huge each scenario would end up being. This hurt the cost more, AND it got more and more fiddly to flip through such long booklets. The gorgeous location book provides over 30 lush locations to explore! Allowing players to traverse through a wealth of intriguing locales, each with unique, scenario-specific content. The less obvious, but just as important, feature the app provides is that we can (and usually do) write multiple entries for each event, especially for events that trigger from the location book. If the event can trigger in multiple scenarios, we wrote even more for it. The app keeps a log of what entries you’ve accessed, and whenever it can, it throws something new at you rather than repeating itself. The app gives us the ability to write more and you the ability to access more of what we write. Each location in the book offers a selection of actions for players to choose, from searching for supplies to interacting with the locals. | Image credit: Charlie Theel

The purpose of the objective card is to remind players what their current goal is. At all times, exactly 1 objective card will be in play.

Thanks to React Native and Expo, I have had a version of the app running on iOS and Android devices. If interest in a native app continues after the game’s release, we could consider polishing those versions of the app and publishing them. To be honest though, once people have the web app running and installed on their devices, they don’t tend to care. IS THIS THING GOING TO BREAK IN SIX MONTHS? Overall, Sea of Thieves is a tad complex to set up and to teach. But its open world approach allows players to get invested fast. It feels great to play, and from cursed dice rolls to ‘gotcha’ card play, is full of little moments that are sure to make you and up to three friends laugh (in a pirate-y accent, of course, aha harr). Gameplay involves you deciding which (numbered) tiles to sail into. These trigger the Crossroad options. The game also comes with a book with different locations, corresponding to your decisions. Each one has worker placement spots, which entice players to explore or speak to the captain. But also you have to consider things like: how will you feed the crew?