Place all booty tokens in a bag and shuffle them thoroughly. Draw 1 booty token per player per day of the campaign and place them on the various spaces under the ship which will be looted by the players (example: 24 booty tokens for a 4 player game). The characters in the graveyard or in the players' dens are removed from the game (they will not be used for the rest of the game). Once you have played through the specified number of days the voyage ends. Now you activate any anchor abilities on your loot tokens or crew members on your ship. Next, total the amount of doubloons you gained from this voyage and add it to your score dial. And lastly discard all your loot tokens and crew members on your ship. To start the next voyage another random six crew members are added to everyone’s hand, you gain income, and loot tokens are put on the specified number of day spaces. Reputation is used to break ties. Since all players have the same exact hand to start the game (and generally the same hand throughout the game), there will be crew members played with the same number. When this happens a player’s reputation is used to break ties. Your reputation is determined randomly to start the game and it may increase or decrease based on the crew members you play. Anytime two or more of the same crew member are played on the same day the player with the lower reputation’s crew member is placed first. Reputation also determines your starting doubloons and income each round. The lower your reputation the more doubloons you get.

While I’ll mostly be judging Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest on its own merit, I will spend some time looking at how it sizes up to the original. Also—and this is important—I promise not to make a single pirate joke over the course of this review. Gameplay Overview: There are 30 characters in all; players start with 9, and will use 6 (or 7) during each Campaign, and replenish with a new six between campaigns. The game mechanics are such that the nine starting cards, and each set of replenishments, are the same for all players. However, the play mechanics and some of the powers, combine to create an increasing variety of crew members in each campaign as the game progresses. We also have now ten more characters to head out on the voyage, as well as a double-sided board. The significance of that board is to give a different challenge by changing up the abilities of the loot tokens. Even better is the option to mix and match the different sets of abilities to create unique combinations each time. That strange idiosyncrasy aside, the game is one of the best designed on the market. Gameplay is elegant. And once more it bears mentioning that the art design is second to none. Artists Ben Carre and Stéphane Gantiez have created a feast for the eyes, each character perfectly rendered to a degree that they could come to life right off the cards. The art alone inspires and supports the theme, and makes the game that much more enjoyable. The players take on the role of crew members of a pirate ship nearing retirement. During the 3 campaigns which compose the game, they will try to amass riches by looting ships.Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest is a game of reading your opponents at the table and working out what others might play. With the added spice of varying degrees of take that everyone at the table is invested with a good level of player interaction. Replayability, outstanding mechanics, and a very workable duration all line up in this game’s favor. Great artwork and exceptional integration of the pirate theme throughout the mechanics provide great flavor. The rules are brief and concise; no confusing language, but there are a couple of places where I would have grouped information differently. Another note about Automa is that it likes money and will gain a boatload of money throughout the game. A lot of the regular character abilities are translated into gaining coins (which makes sense given that this is the likely outcome when playing against other people), which definitely makes the game more challenging. I was only playing on the regular difficulty (Automa starts on 0 coins) and I’ve only beat it twice (once sunny, once stormy).

When the Saber is taken you must choose a character from an adjacent player's den and discard it if possible. Final Score: 4.5 Stars – With top-notch production values and straightforward mechanics, Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest is an outstanding game with loads of replayability. Let’s illustrate this with an example. Loot tiles aren’t all equal in value: indeed one, the Relic, costs you points if you collect it. So if there’s a day with a couple of Relic tiles among the loot and you have the rank 5 card Cabin Boy, you might be tempted to play it. The Cabin Boy’s “day” power nets you gold if he’s the leftmost card, which is likely given that he’s rank 5. At “dusk” he stops you from taking any loot which, if it’s a Relic, is quite helpful. So he looks like an easy choice: except all the other players will have a Cabin Boy and they’ll all be thinking the same thing. All of a sudden he’s not likely to be the leftmost card anymore, and you might want to reconsider. Unless all the other players are also thinking that same thing, in which case ... Production value of Stonemaier Games is consistently high, little details like linen finish rulebooks make their games feel special. Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest is no exception. Particularly pleasing are the loot tokens that have a nice tactile quality to them. I’m not entirely sure why the loot tokens didn’t arrive in the cloth bag that they will eventually be stored in, but I was pleased that they came in a compostable bag. Certainly a commendable step in the right direction. The art in Libertalia is telling you how good the game is, and it's not lying. This is a really smart game. It's tense and surprising and fun. What could be a simple game of blind bidding for the best prizes becomes a cutthroat power play with more depth than you thought you were going to find.I’m a big fan of Wingspan and Viticulture and as a result am a bit of a fanboy of Stonemaier Games. I admire their production values and what they do as a smaller publisher in the board game industry. This can set expectations higher than they should be for each release. At the end of each voyage, some cards and most loot tokens also have an “anchor” power that activates. These mostly net you some bonus gold but there are fun exceptions such as the hook token that lets you keep a card you’ve played in your tableau, which can be handy if it has an ongoing “night” effect. Libertalia: Wind of Galecrest makes full use of the simple day, dusk, night and anchor system to come up with some really engaging effect combos, ensuring there’s plenty of variety among its motley crew. The flip side of the board even has a whole new set of loot token effects to increase player interaction. Resolve dusk abilities right to left with characters being placed on ships and receiving loot. The Pilferer card and loot is discarded. Loot is taken based on the priority list (unless stated otherwise). At the start of each voyage (round), loot tokens are laid out onto slots on the board. There are seven types of loot tokens, each with a different use or monetary value. One of the tokens is a relic and it’s the only purely “bad” one, although there are characters that might pop up who can use them in creative ways to get doubloons (the game’s scoring mechanism). If you enjoyed the original Libertalia or like games with lots of interaction give Libertalia Winds of Galecrest a try. It plays differently every time you play and if you don’t mind a bit of chaos is fun every time too.

The simplicity in the design of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest belies the depth of strategy inherent in the game. Players can never be totally confident that playing the highest-ranking pirate from their hand will get them the best loot token. Also complicating things is that players know what cards everyone else has access to, so the game becomes a mind game of anticipating the moves of others. “I know that they know that I have the card that they think I know that they’ll play.” That is often where most of the fun in the game is: The intricacies of predicting the plays of others and doing one’s best to undermine it. 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).To setup for the next campaign each player gets 10 new doubloons and add an identical random set of 6 crew cards to the three crew left over.

Starting from left to right, the characters chosen will activate a daytime power, should they have them. This may be gaining doubloons, taking loot tokens or making matters difficult for your opponents. Once the day has happened, the dusk phase happens, starting with the rightmost player. Libertalia’s strength is in Mori’s design. With each player beginning the game with the exact same cards, emphasis is on timing and card choice as opposed to player resources and random card draws. The 30 different card effects are well thought out and work well in combination with each other. The resulting card interactions, (and consequently, player interactions) provide an entertaining and compelling journey toward Pirate retirement.The youngest player shuffles their character cards and draws 9. They read the number (the rank) and name out loud so that each player chooses the same cards as them. Each player takes these 9 cards in their hand. Important Granny Wata (27): Gain 2 doubloons if there is only 1 Granny Wata, otherwise discard all Granny Watas (night). The life of a pirate is free and open, and that’s reflected in Merchants and Marauders, an open world adventure board game where you’re able to choose your own path to victory. While historians probably still baulk at it, it’s easily the most real history-inspired game on our list. The components for this game are great. There is some debate but I like the updated brighter artwork with animal crew members. It is less gritty but I like the new fun whimsical design. The rule book is easy to read and follow. And while the game is pretty easy to teach and learn, you can always watch the tutorial here.