For the most part, the rule book did a good job explaining the nuances of the mechanics and made learning the game easy. At Way Too Many Games we feature a transparent review method divided into four segments: Graphics (25% of the final score), Gameplay (25%), Sound (10%), and Fun Factor (40%). The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Even with my favorite games, like Betrayal at House on the Hill, Nemesis, and Gloomhaven , I want to make sure I’m highlighting both their strengths and weaknesses. Dead Men Tell No Tales’ fire die and Deckhands feel a lot like Pandemic, so much so that I struggle t not draw comparisons between the two. Dead Men comes with cardboard room tiles, wooden pirate figures, wooden deckhand skulls, individual player boards, lots of other tokens and cards, and a few dozen dice. If you are unfamiliar with the base game, DMTNT is a co-operative game where you take on the role of pirates attempting to loot treasure from The Skelit’s Revenge.Dead Men Tell No Tales takes you to the high seas where you must survive on a burning pirate ship long enough to collect a certain amount of treasure.

Skeletons all carry either cutlasses (which can improve a pirate's battling ability) or grog (which can reduce their fatigue). Losing the Game: The players probably lose because either too many explosions occur or too many deckhands appear. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. There’s already so many moving pieces in the base game that unless you’re really familiar with Dead Men Tell No Tales, adding The Kraken can push the experience over the line from hectic to outright too much to enjoy. The absolute randomness of everything in the game (from set up, token draws, tile draws, dice rolls for combat, etc.

On the opposite side of this, the variety of mechanics, possible choices and resulting outcomes mean this is a very enjoyable experience for more experienced gamers looking for a deeper experience. Fires can be decreased one point at a time, which makes it less fatiguing, easier to move through, and less likely to explode. As part of this step, a token is drawn from the bag to determine what is inside the new room, be it Skeleton Crew, Trapdoor, or Guard/Treasure token. You could make the valid argument that there’s too much to keep track of for a game of this weight, but I make the case that should be consider a strength of Dead Men Tell No Tales.

As players become more familiar with Dead Men Tell No Tales they can choose to increase the difficulty for a more interesting experience, providing a high replay value. Any tokens in a room that explodes are immediately destroyed, even if they are precious game winning treasure tokens.

The ship lurched to one side, and I instinctively reached for the nearest post — despite the flames that crawled up it.