Asmodee Libertalia Board Game - English

Libertalia Is purely and simply an awesome game. Set up is quick and the game play while engaging and tactical has few rules and so good for new players or those with 40 minutes or so to burn. As I say the rules are simple. Everyone starts with the same crew in a bud to make the most booty so your captain and crew can afford to retire in the eponymous libertalia. The complexity comes with the way you may try to cripple your opponent and build a synergy with your crew. Possibly holding back a key crew member to use in a future round where they will arrive unexpectedly or be more effective. All the rules are on the cards and effects may happen at the time of play, at the end of the turn. Or the end of the round dependent on the action stated. Have no fear thou this is not a true deck builder or collectible card game nor is it as complex as 'Magic The Gathering' in the interaction if the cards. It's just fun and potentially back stabby fun with a Piratey flavour. Avast an haul the main'sil ya swabs!

I love this pirate theme game but I have yet to find anyone else who enjoys it enough to play it with me more than once meaning it mostly gathers dust on my shelf. In this game you are all given the same hand of pirates and have to chose one a day to place on the boat. The pirates are then ordered in rank from lowest to highest and you do the special ability on the card. Once everyone has played their special ability which could cause other pirates to leave the ship or for you to swap your card for a new one you deal out treasure which could be good or bad. Your pirate then leaves the ship to go in to your den, beware he may not stay and maybe killed off in a manner of ways depending on the card. Any cards in your den with a night time ability then use this. You do this for 6 days, the 7th day is the day of rest for three weeks and the richest pirate at the end is the winner! This game is part strategy, part memory and part luck. Some cards get discarded from your den if there is more than one den with them in so you have to remember who has played theirs already as you don't want to end up discarding your card because of someone else. It is also a guessing game as to who you think people will put out by looking at the treasure, if there is only one good treasure and a lot of bad then you know players will likely go for a higher ranking pirate to set out but are there pirates who can kill the highest ranking pirate on the ship in players hands.... I think its a great game with fun mechanics but have found it is not to everyones taste. My son picked this game up with ease when he was 8yrs olf but it is too advanced for my daughter who is 6 even though she plays a lot of games with us.

This is an interesting, fun and addictive board game. The premise is that you are a pirate captain, and you want to retire - so are going on three more raids to try and get some booty. You have to compete with 1-5 other pirates though, who are going on the same raids. You pick a colour (black, white, blue, green, red and yellow), which corresponds to a set of cards, a den and a score counter. There is a board which is the ship, and a separate scoreboard. Someone (according to the rules the youngest player, but that gets boring after a while) selects nine random characters of the 30 available - and the other players all get the same nine characters. So in the first raid, all players have the same characters to play. Each raid lasts six days (not in real time - don't worry!), and each day has three phases - day, dusk and night. There are 30 different character cards, ranked 1 (Parrot) to 30 (Spanish Governor) of which you have nine to play with for each raid - different characters have different functions - for example, the Beggar has a daytime function, whereby the player who played the highest ranked card must give three doubloons to the person who played the beggar, the Cook has a dusk function of being able to take two booty tiles instead of one, and Granny Wata has a night function of gaining two doubloons. The day and dusk functions occur on the day the character is played, while the night functions occur each night. There are also end of raid functions, which either gain you or lose you doubloons. The booty tiles can be treasure -worth doubloons, cursed masks - which lose you doubloons, Spanish spies - which kill the character who takes them, or sabres - which allow the character to kill a character in another captain's den. There are the same number of booty tiles as players for each day of the raid, selected at random from a bag. At the end of the raid, you count up your doubloons, and that is your score. You will have (probably) three cards left at the end, so the next raid starts with the youngest player selecting another six cards for everyone to play with. The second and third raids are more interesting, as the players have different cards in their hands depending on what they have played in previous raids. The next raids continue as the first, at the end of each you add up your doubloons and add to your score. The person who has the most, wins. It is a fascinating game - there is a lot of thinking to do when choosing which character to play, depending on what booty tiles are available that day, what cards you have already played (e.g. the mutineer kills one of your own characters each night - so don't play him if you have cards you want to keep), what cards you think your opponent may play. It can be frustrating when you play the wrong thing, or when your carefully laid plan goes awry as someone else plays something unexpected. It is great fun though. I highly recommend it.

An absolutely brilliant game! So much fun. Great that it plays 6 players too as my group tends to hover around the 6 player mark. Can be played 2-6 but I think, for a really decent game, you need at least 3 or 4... mostly because you're constantly trying to stitch up your friends, so the more of you there are, the more fun it is! The components, while all card, are high quality. The artwork on the playing cards is lovely and not so subtle in how they've pinched the likenesses of famous folk (Elisha Cuthbert is blatantly the tavern woman) and the text is easy to understand. This gets pled regularly in my gaming group now and if we haven't planned out what we're playing that night in advance, I generally get asked if we can play this one. Couldn't praise the game enough!

This is simply an astonishingly good game. It clicks almost immediately, and as soon as it has, eyes light up around the table. Everyone having the same cards at the same time (to start with) is a stroke of genius, and it means that everything comes down to nerve, quick thinking, and predicting your opponents' actions. You gotta GET IN THEIR HEADS. It's an extraordinary game. One of the best I've ever played.

A fantastic game of pirate based fun. The basic idea is you all start with the same hand of cards. The game is then down to how you play them. Looking at what prizes are available to grab and trying to figure out how the other players are going to try and bilk you out of your well deserved booty. As you finish each week of ship time new cards are added to your hands and you have to try and recall what your opponents have already used so that you have an idea of how the next stage of the game will play out. Easy to teach and once everyone has the idea you realize, like all the best board / card games its not about luck but about how you are interacting with the other players. A personal favorite, just beware the monkey!

Because there is a randomised shift of 'treasures' and roles for each turn and each set of turns in a game, each time you play this the game is a bit different. There is overall consistency of playability, and plenty of room for player decision-making, as well as some scope for strategising. Nicely balanced.

All games will appeal differently to different people but there is no getting away from how clever and eminently replayable this game is. All players have the exact same set of cards as each other and there are no random elements and almost no hidden information. In essence, it is an auction game where you bid on loot, using the seniority of your crew members to determine who gets the first pick. However, each crew member can only be used once and there are lots of auctions to bid on. Each auction will contain different loot, some with more valuable pieces than others, some with cursed loot that will net you negative points, meaning you will want to plan ahead which auctions are more important to you. To make it more interesting still, not only does the seniority of your crew members determine the order of looting, but each one will have a special ability as well. Sometimes it pays to lose an auction simply to get a special ability into play, sometimes it is about winning the auction no matter the other consequences. Usually, it is a tough choice! Since all players consider and choose simultaneously, there is little downtime. The special abilities of the various crew members contain just the right amount of stabbing other players to make it personal. In short: I love it!

Très bon jeu de carte pour qui aime anticiper les réactions des autre. Vous avez les mêmes cartes que les autre, a vous d'en tirer le meilleur profit. boite anglaise

If you like deck builders and pirates this is the game for you. i got this after watching it played on tabletop and have played it multiple times with friends. it has great replay ability as the card you get change and how you play them with each game and you don't always know who will win till the last round and see who has the most booty!!! :p

In libertalia, you all play pirates with an identical deck of characters, and every turn you have to play some characters out of your hand to earn the highest amount of bounty. The game has 3 campaigns of 6 turns, so it won't last forever. At first, all players have the same characters in hand, but the more the game progresses, the more it starts to differ. I like this game because it is easy to teach and quite fun to play. Each game is quite different (all players start with the same, but random hand) and the replay value is high.

Very balanced, awesome and re-playable game with very quality components and genius idea/game mechanics. Strongly recommended for experienced board gamers, who want to get a new impressions and unpredictable gameplay.

Libertalia is a hidden role game where you select a member of your pirate crew to go collect the best treasure from a ship. However, each crew members have different strengths and special abilities that can affect the other players pirates so that you can get first pick of the treasure you want. Artwork - I think the artwork is fantastic. It is very "Pirates of the Caribbean" feeling and I really like that and think a lot of people can easy get into the theme because it's very accessible. I wouldn't say it's trying to play off the success of the movie however, just using a similar style which I think fits the game. Components - Nothing too special here. It's mainly a card game where each pirate crew member is a card in your deck. The playing board is a ship and it is nothing special, but fits the game just fine. What's probably the most special part of the components in a nifty velvet bag that you keep the treasure in for drawing randomly to see what plunder a ship will have. No miniatures, but that really wouldn't fit this game at all. Box is also really nice. After several play through nothing is really showing much wear and tear, but I'm careful to tell people not to aggressive shuffle their cards. I can see "that guy" who bends his cards when he holds them damaging these just like a normal playing deck. Game Play - It's actually a very simple game when it comes down to it. The base of the game is that everybody has the same 30 pirate crew members in their deck. One player randomly draws crew members from the deck (7) and all other then collect those same 7 cards from their decks as well. So in the first round of the game you know you have the exact same starting point as everybody else (definitely helps balance the game from "lucky" draws). The game then just start as people secretly choose a pirate from their hand to send and try and collect treasure on the ship. This is the heart of the game and is part strategy, but also has a luck element as you can't be sure what card somebody else might select. I can see some people being turned off by this luck element (or chaos), but I think it makes the game really fun and light hearted. It's a victory point game, so the person who collected the most gold after the end of 3 turns will win. Learning Teach the Game - As you can tell, the game isn't that complicated. It might take a little while for somebody to learn if they are just reading the instruction guide (which is actually pretty good), but if you were taught by somebody who already knows how to play, you'd learn really quickly. Overall I really like this game. It fits the niche of a fast to play game (usually over in 45 minutes) that has elements of strategy and luck. The pirate theme also comes out pretty good because you do feel like you are trying to steal treasure from the ship to amass the biggest fortune. It's easy to learn as well, so I'd definitely recommend it to newer gamers, although it's not quite as accessible as an entry level game like Ticket to Ride.