High seas, low stakes
CORSAIRS OF VALERIA
Designer: Wouter van Strien | Artist: Mihajlo Dimitrievski
According to board games, the only thing pirates love more than plunder is racing. Games like Jamaica and Extraordinary Adventures: Pirates! have brought the hijinks of Wacky Races to the high seas as players scramble to set sail to prove their piratey worth. Whilst these games can comfortably take centre stage in a gaming night, Corsairs is a light and breezy dice game designed to warm up your cockles or fill a short lunch break with a sprint for silver.
2-5 players set sail to the legendary Skull Island, pillaging ports, merchant ships and each other along the way as they compete to be the first to own six chests full of silver. To do this, each player's turn starts with them rolling five custom wooden dice, deciding if they want to spend grog to reroll any of them, before finally resolving the actions on all dice. Each die has the same set of six faces, including actions to gain silver coins, sail their ship across the board, gain grog for future rerolls or lose silver to the mighty Skull Island, sweetening the pot for whichever sea dog lands there first.
At the end of their turn, if a player owns five silver coins they can trade them in for a chest of silver, banking them away safely from all but the most determined of buccaneer. For in addition to players being able to use the cannon face to rob neutral merchant ships, rolling three cannons will let you take all loose silver from any other player, whilst rolling a full Yahtzee of cannonades lets you steal a whole treasure chest instead, cementing your status as luckiest (and most hated) bilge rat at the table.
Much like how Love Letter's first western edition was set in the world of heavy strategy series Tempest, Corsairs is a reimplementation of the designer's previous game Wacky Pirates, now set in scurvy seascape of the Valeria franchise. Van Strien has made great use of this refresh to improve upon the original's design, adding a randomized tile-laying board design that helps create a different race track for each game, which when combined with a wealth of unique pirate captain power cards gives the game a generous amount of replay value.
These additions may help keep the game fresh, but they fail from distracting from the biggest flaw that Corsairs suffers. For all the love that's gone into creating a game of action and treasure, the main mechanic of push your luck dice rolling is both too random, yet somehow not random enough. Because each die face is different, it's hard to ever have a real choice in what you do. The one-insix chance of any given face showing up means that, despite the game's generous rerolling system, you'll often be stuck with whatever fate had in store. The unique captain powers may help each player to combat this differently, but sadly they only manage to transform a game that should be about risking it all on the roll of the dice to a simplistic task of risk aversion. There is always "best" and "worst" way to play each captain, meaning that experienced gamers will soon see through the game's spirited attempts at randomization and optimise the fun out of the game.
That's not to say this game doesn't have its charms and those with younger scallywags or who are new to board games will definitely appreciate the game's light hearted rules and playtime, but if you've been rolling bones for a few years now you may find the novelty wears off quicker than watered-down rum.
MATTHEW VERNALL
WE SAY
If you're new to push your luck dice games it's a fun casual title with plenty of replay value. But if you don't like the mechanics or care for pirates this game won't change your mind.
WHAT'S IN THE BOX:
◗ 5 Wooden dice
◗ 5 Ship tokens
◗ 5 Ship boards
◗ 35 Cardboard silver coins
◗ 11 Captain cards
◗ 1 Starting island tile
◗ 1 Skull island tile
◗ 4 double-sided sea tiles
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