TIny Epic Pirates
⭐ 8,5/ 10
👥 1-4 players
🕗30-60 minutes
👨👩👧👦14+
Gameplay
In Tiny Epic Pirates you are a pirate and with your boat you sail over seas to collect gold and bury your treasures. The player who is the first to bury three treasures wins the game.
Each player has it’s own boat to sail over the sea. Each turn you choose an action to execute, and you sail towards the island that you want. There are several actions that you can take, they are on your rondel. By placing your captain on the action, you can plunder, attack, sell, dive, expand your crew or hide in a cave. But, be aware; there sail several other boats on the sea that you can plunder, but they can also attack you.
By executing smart moves and actions you can collect gold, that you are going to bury in treasury. If you buried three treasury the game ends.
Review
What we love about Tiny Epic games, is that it is such a tiny box, and it seems that you are going to play a tiny game. But, the opposite is true. In that tiny box is a complete and full-fledged board game.
The rondel mechanism is executed very well in our opinion. Each round you can perform one action and you can only move your captain clockwise. This means you need to plan your actions carefully. De rules are quite extensive and it takes some time to read them. There is a very handy playthrough video. This helps to get to know the game. As soon as you know and understand the rules, the game plays very logical and smooth, and not complicated at all.
What we also really like about this game, is that after each round, once all the actions on the rondel are executed, the other ships on the sea are going to move. There is a Merchant Ship that tries to attack you. The further you get in the game, the more difficult it is to dodge the ship. And once you are hit by this ship, it has serious consequences, so it demands planning and prioritizing your actions.
Evaluating the quality of the components of this game, we can only say that we are (again) impressed with the quality of the components and the artwork. It is impressive how the game fits in the tiny box.
A small side note; the ships are small, and the blocks that you are going to collect and trade fit precisely on the ships. For people with larger fingers this can be quite annoying. With us, the ships fell over regularly and at a certain point this became a bit annoying.
In short; Tiny Epic Pirates is a fun, strategic game with a strong and well executed theme. The gameplay is smooth and fun with 2 or more players. We did not play the solo version, but looking at the rules and the mechanism we expect that this is good solo game.
End Scoring
✔️ Strong theme
✔️ Nice use of the rondel mechanism
✔️ Very competitivegameplay
➖ Extended rules
➖ Blocks just fit into to ships; can be frustrating
This game has been made available to us by the publisher Gamelynn Games for review purposes. Our opinion is not influenced by this and remains our own.
