Libertalia

Libertalia is a Pirate themed board game designed by Paolo Mori, I first saw it played on Tabletop and thought it looked good fun yet not too complex. And after a couple of plays that still holds, with a few caveats.

Overview

The aim of Libertalia is to amass the greatest fortune over the last 3 weeks of your pirating career before you retire to Libertalia. Each player will have the same crew to send on quests every day, with more crew being made available at the end of the week. Inter player interaction comes from deciding what your opponents are going to use, and a few actions allow you to attack opponents.

What I enjoyed

The theme was really good, normally I’m not too much in to theme, but Pirates. For example the scoreboard is not a boring square but has crinkled edges and looks like an old treasure map. Whilst you had plenty of choice, for me there was little decision paralysis. Finally, it felt like you had agency over your outcome, by which I mean it didn’t feel like you can do well without playing well or vice versa.

What wasn’t so good

Having to pause for setup twice in the middle of the game really got in the way of the rhythm of the game, this could be slightly alleviated by getting the second and third week recruits lined up prior to the game - but you still need to reset everyone’s money, collect their loot and then put out loot for the next week.

This wasn’t an issue for me, but some people just didn’t get what was happening, they were mostly confused by the ordering in which things happened - this could have been down to my explanation but I also find it relatively confusing. This meant they just didn’t get what they should do and ended up playing randomly. Which has the side effect of damaging the game for the rest of us, but either fate was on our side or the game handles it well because it wasn’t too major an impact on the actual gameplay.

Would I recommend it?

Aye, I would. Though I would suggest watching the Tabletop video linked at the beginning (You needn’t watch all to get the gist of the game), or if you are able play someone else’s copy or get down to one of the many Board Game clubs, or one the few Board games cafés then I would highly recommend you try out Libertalia.