Reviews written by mc

At its core this is a very simple game - it's like Colovini looked at Candyland and turned it into a strategy game. (That's meant to be a complement). It's a race game in which you have to get all your pirates to the other end of the track. Play a card to move a pirate to a matching symbol on the board; the catch is to get more cards you have to move your pirate back to where you or someone else has a pirate or two stationed. So it's all about managing your position in relation to others; if you leave a pirate behind it can be very difficult to catch up, but not getting out ahead makes it easier for other to leapfrog you.

The newest edition comes with a range of variable setups and additional rules to allow you to play how you want, adding in the obstacle of a boat passage with limited seats, playing backwards, or with special powers, which are thematically fun (you can rob other players with a gun card, light a lamp to look at the next cards in the deck, etc).

Some not bad old-school german-style family entertainment to be had here.

Sending out your tribe to do stuff and then rolling the dice for the hunt is quite a nifty little foundation for a game about hunter gatherers. But then the cards to upgrade things to improve that endgame score are just meaningless numbers with no sense of anything really, other than some arithmetic, which feels decidedly non-neanderthal.