The Pirate Republic

GaGarfieldstar1.0

So after giving this game a third chance to convince me to keep it I played a competitive 4 player game as me playing all the players. So every player tried to sink a single ship to gain some swagger. What else could I do? There were not many because of the setup. And if I was succesfull or not is only determined by the initiative roll. Because if I have to defend first I have to spend 80-100% of my cards and then have no cards left to attack. So it was just repeating this step -> try to sink a single ship, if I can't attack first try to flee and try it again. The players with hit of course gained swagger and ran away. But still no one was able to reach level 2 in the first round And hey during the setup for round 2 I had to place ships in territories where already were 2. So I'm now facing territories with 3 ships in it. And if that's not possible by rules (to tired to search for a rule for that, I can only remember that rule for initial setup, but not for round 2) it doesn't matter, because none of the 4 players are able to fight 2 ships. So in the first turns of round 2 I was hunting the few single ships, some of them were of course strong naval ships... And at this point I decided to get rid of the game. Not even mentioning the Chaos Cards which bring even more randomness to the game. You can do about 3-4 turns in a round. If you are lucky you can sink 2 ships, which will give you about max 6 swagger in the first round. Second round you mave have an Elite Pirate Card that you can use once during the second round. But because there are even less single ships that you can sink you can't progress, and always have the same crap cards in your hand, not able to fight against land tokens or bigger ships. Most of the time in the beginning you gain 1 or 2 swagger, yeah... I really don't understand how this game is meant to be played. Maybe it's fun for a player if he always roll a hit and can reach level 2 and 3 fast and than can fight the bigger ships. But for everyone else that rolls a miss sometimes it's just a pain in the ass. And in my opinion the game dictates what you have to do. There is no deck building here, you can't choose which card you want to add to your deck, no possibility to get rid of weak cards. It's just looking at your 4 cards and then decide which ship/land token you can fight. But only if you roll a hit... For me this game is broken. [c] Theme: ★★★★☆ <!-- size 7]Very good --> Gameplay: ★☆☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]Broken --> Interaction: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]Battles against others possible --> Artwork: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]Ok --> Luck: ★★★★☆ <!-- size 7]Initiative die is essential and pure luck --> Strategy: ★★☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]Not much --> Components: ★★★★☆ <!-- size 7]Cheap plastic ships, nothing special unless you have the goodies --> Play duration: <!-- size 7]Not yet played a full game --> Easy to teach: ★☆☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]Horrible --> Rules quality: ★☆☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]One of the worst I've ever read --> Setup time: ★★☆☆☆ <!-- size 7]Quite a lot to setup --> No downtime: <!-- size 7]Not yet played with others --> Replay value: ★★★☆☆ <!-- size 7]Random setup, random missions, random chaos cards --> [/c]