I didn’t stay long at the board game club meeting yesterday, but I had enough time to try Pirate’s Cove with five players. It was much better experience than with three and I even upgraded my Geek rating for the game. It’s now nine; three-player game is eight. It’s not really my style of a game, even, but I can’t help it: the theme is good and strongly integrated in the game, the components are very good and the gameplay is fairly straightforward after you go through the effort of learning it.
I was also pleased to find out there’s enough simultaneous action to keep the game pleasantly short even with five players. It took us about an hour to finish the game. That’s a good length for such a fun-focused dicefest as Pirate’s Cove is.
This time I got a terrific ship, but didn’t manage to get quite enough points — mostly because I was the target of Blackbeard in the epic three players against the Blackbeard fight. If I had survived that fight, I would’ve won the game. But that’s life in the high seas! Can’t say it matters too much. The game was great fun, nevertheless. Pirate’s Cove is highly recommended to anyone looking for a beautiful game with a strong theme.