Minion Games Dead Men Tell No Tales Core Game

Product Information

Swap Your Item Card- At the start of the game, each player is randomly dealt a starting item card. The remaining cards are placed face-up on the table for all players to see. On their turn, players can spend an action token to swap the item in their possession with one of the face-up cards in the supply. Klenko is an independent designer whose past work include dexterity games Fuse and Flipships, along with espionage strategy title Covert and the compact Pandemic experience Rapid Response.

Dead Men Tell No Tales ended up being a fun cooperative board game that’s already made it to our tabletop a few times. Because there are so many things to do in the game, I feel like it almost has a puzzle nature to it. The game is not easy to win and will definitely offer up a challenge. Expect to lose this one in the beginning, especially when playing on the harder difficulty levels. In my opinion this game is definitely worth a buy if the type of game you’re looking for is a deep co-op experience that can be played in under an hour and thirty minutes, that has the depth and complexity to be more than a gateway game but, not so heavy it takes a whole evening or weekend to play. In my opinion one of the biggest justifications I look for with games is re-playability and this has it in abundance. No two games ever feel the same and the strong player interaction really promotes the feeling of a true co-operative experience, something that isn't always guaranteed. So the obvious move is to always be lowering all the fire levels, right? Well not necessarily. When you draw the Skelit Revenge cards at the end of your turn, some will have you increase all the fire dice matching the drawn number by one. So if you’ve been working really hard and lowered half the dice to a 3, well now all those dice are increasing by one. It almost behooves you to keep your fires at different levels to avoid something like that from happening. To summarise, ultimately I think for a game to be worth buying everything else can be ignored if the following two criteria are met, did I have fun when I played it? And do I want to play it again? If both those are a yes then its worth time and money invested into it. Final Thoughts Take Pirate Actions –With the exception of Lydia Lamore who has six, each Pirate has five action tokens that are spent to resolve actions.Dead Men Tell No Tales provides players with a delightfully challenging game without being inapproachable to new players. Despite its complexity, the round structure is easy to understand and all the pieces fall into place after the first couple of rounds, making it easy for new players the get comfortable with their first game. The number of treasures players need to retrieve scales nicely with the number of players without increasing the difficulty. Players can choose the difficulty setting they want regardless of how many people are at the table. Even though Dead Men Tell No Tales seems to borrow concepts from those games, I still feel like it’s different enough to stand on its own. One mechanic I really enjoy is the way the fire is handled. Each room has a die that signifies its fire level. If that die ever reaches six, the room explodes while destroying everything in it. Furthermore, the fire in all adjacent rooms are increased by one. Some rooms even have powder kegs that will explode on a lower number. Players will have to manage their fatigue level, if it gets too high, they can die.

Finally, Dead Men Tell No Tales does a decent job with its player scaling. I tend to prefer the game with 3 players as I feel like I have a bit more control over the board and the downtime is a bit less. At the higher player counts, things can get a little chaotic as the game state changes so much between your turns. Final Thoughts: The Revenge cards make things even more challenging for the players. Lastly, what happened to Jeff Petersens “Family of Gamers” series? This was something I was going to start on BGG and still might. My problem revolves all around the resources required to maintain a blog like that.Search The Ship –The first/current player takes one board tile known as a “room tile” and places it face up making sure the doors shown are aligned with doors on the existing room tiles. The room tile will have a red or yellow die showing a side with a number of pips, a matching die is then drawn and placed on the square on the tile with the image of the die. Next a token is drawn from the bag and placed in the room just added to the board. If the final room tile placed has a door not connecting to any other room then you have a second exit with which to escape the ship –“GAAAARGH!”