F@#$ Libertalia

Two posts in a week!
What are you thinking?
Won't you get burned out again?
Will people still not care either way?

Libertalia

Libertalia is mostly a card game with some neat mechanics.  It's not overly deep, but it's paced decently well and plays at about 15 minutes per player.  30 minutes per with Juan.

Theme:  fairly well implemented, you can imagine this with another genre but the goal of gathering booty with your rogues gallery works quite well.

Game Play:  each player gets 9 identical cards to start the round of 6 plays.  In between rounds, you draw 6 more identical hands for each player.

Each round has 6 plays.  You place a card, resolve its effects, grab some treasure and move onto the next play.  But not everyone plays the same card at the same time, so hands will change!  In fact starting the follow up rounds, everyone has similar hands but its quite unlikely that any are identical!

During the round set up, someone added a bunch of treasure tokens for each of the 6 days of the voyage.    Each day you select a card to play.  Each card has some power that helps you: select moar treasure, is in addition to treasure, or what have you.  Each card has a numerical value, the higher the value picks booty first, the lower the value has it's Dawn effect first.

Wait, what?  Dawn effect?  Oh yeah, each day has three phases:  Dawn Dusk and Night.

Dawn - this is pre-select treasures.  A bunch of cards manipulate who selects and what during the dawn phase.

Dusk phase- this happens when you select treasure.  like maybe you don't pick any, or maybe you pick two or maybe you throw all but one of your treasures overboard.

Night phase - some cards have an ongoing power for every night.   Like gain 2$ every night this card is in play.

these are all represented by symbols on the card, along with a 4th end of voyage symbol.  Those effects go off at the end of the voyage.  Duh.

So the booty:  Some are good, some are meh and some are bad.  And in a turn without any card generated exceptions, you must select one.  So there is a reason for all those treasure manipulation powers.

(I am not google searching images for Bad Booty but I want you to be aware it did
occur to me)

So that's the game.  Play cards, select booty, repeat until end of voyage and follow the directions on the cards in the meantime.

The intrigue happens because quite a few cards are good if only you have them in play or need to make it to end of voyage amidst a ridiculous amount of rounds of people trying to kill your dudes.

So it is very much tactical and strategic, if not overly intellectual.

Review:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are things to like about this game.  

The interactions of everyone's cards are cool.

It's a pretty elegant design.

I'm just not convinced of how much fun it is.

And I'm fairly good at this game.  And by good, I mean I figured out good tactics really really early.  But the tactics are 'don't get greedy',  'look for cool interactions' and 'count cards'.  Literally every single player I play board games with can figure out the proper tactics after a game or two.

Maybe there's a deeper strategy I'm not seeing, like maybe there's cards that are way more advantageous to carry onto round 3, but it sure seems like that's a game to game decision.

Anyways, this is clearly not a favorite, but because it plays fast and doesn't last all night I'd keep it in semi-regular rotation.  It would also be a nice filler game at board game sessions with multiple tables playing different games.  

"You have an hour left? Ok Let's break out Libertalia"