The Board Game Family would like to thank Stonemaier Games for a review copy of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest. Each voyage lasts a day longer than the previous and six more character cards are added (and combine with characters not played in the previous voyage) until the end of the final voyage. To summarize it briefly: A solo player plays the normal game against two automated opponents, one who plays randomly and one who targets specific loot tokens each turn based on the back of the top card of Automa draw deck. And since it’s a simultaneous-selection game, adding more players doesn’t add much more to the length of play.

But there is so much going on below the deck of those decisions that makes Libertalia scratch a strategical itch and also facilitates a ton of player interaction that isn’t always a direct attack. Join the community and come discuss games like Codenames, Wingspan, Brass, and all your other favorite games! The all play mechanic ensures there is very little down time and days and journeys pass like ships in the night. Gone are the cardboard chits to represent the loot, now replaced with chunky Azul like tiles that are deeply satisfying and the scoring dials, while fiddly to assemble, is lovely to have on the board.

Although all players get the same six cards, chances are they played different cards during the preceding voyage which means everyone is now holding different hands. Where the game comes alive, the gunpowder behind its cannonball if you like, is the interactions between the players, and the slowly diverging strategies.

There is no set answer to those questions in this game, but there’s definitely plenty to think about.Ten years later, Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest celebrates the foundations of the original design with a revised and expanded edition that includes all-new art, 40 characters per player, a reputation system to resolve tiebreakers, deluxe loot tokens, a robust solo mode, and much more. Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest is a new game that uses the core concepts of its predecessor as a launching point for new mechanisms, new balancing, and even some new species for the pirates. 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. It’s also important to note that after the first journey, players will be left with cards in their hand that will then probably differ from everyone else’s.