This poor community hasn't gotten any love for months! Here's my attempt to breathe a little life into the Board Gaming community on Hive.
For the past few months 
We spent a couple of months playing through the campaign of Clank! Legacy: Acquisitions Incorporated. I'll see about putting a review together for that game. I loved it, but I'm not sure if the boys liked it as much as I did.
With Clank! finished, I wanted to find another game that we could sink our teeth into. Reviews for Forgotten Waters have been through the roof from all of my favorite reviewers, so I ordered a copy on Amazon. After completing the first mission, Beyond the Ocean's Edge, I feel like I've played enough to give my impressions.
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The game is played using a map board with tiles for points of interest and a ship token. A location book that contains much of the actual gameplay mechanics. Several boards for tracking things like hull damage, supplies, crew number, and crew discontent. There are also cards for treasure and other items. 12 sided dice are used for skill checks. And each player gets their own character sheet.
The game comes with a pad of about 20-30 different pirates and players take one to track their story and progress. Every pirate sheet in the pad is unique and each pirate has their own story and their own strengths and weaknesses.
The centerpiece to the game is the website https://www.fwcrossroads.com/. The game can not be played without it.
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I chose the "Install for offline use" option on my phone and it installed like an app. Then I screen-casted my phone to my TV so that the sound would play on my bigger speakers.
A super cool feature of this game is the "Click here to access the Forgotten Waters Remote Assistant" link. It provides everything needed for people to play this game remotely over Zoom or Discord. Only one person needs to own a copy of the game!
There may be some spoilers below, so let me just say that the game is a blast! It's super funny, the art is absolutely fanstastic, and the voice acting is superb. Both of my nephews,
Gameplay works by going to one of the locations in the Location Book. As soon as the page is opened, you start a timer in the app. You then have 40 seconds for everyone to chose what they are going to do by placing their standee on their choice. We never exceeded the 40 second limit, but it's a good mechanic to prevent analysis paralysis.
On the blue places, only 1 person can go there. On the green places, multiple players can go there. Not shown are red places that require someone to go there.
After the players place their standees, you go down the line and do what it says on the right of the page. You can see in the photo above, one person went to 4. Psychic's Shanty. They would roll a 12 sided dice and read the entry based on their roll. The beauty of the system is that you just type in the entry number into the website and the voice actors act out the entry. So if the blue player rolled a 2, they would type 302 into the website. You can try it yourself by going here, click play now, then Beyond the Ocean's Edge. They type 302 into the box and click "YAR".
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The passage is read aloud when you press play. At the bottom, it tells the consequences of your action. We lost a crew member!
Just about everything in this game is beautiful. I really love the style of the illustrations. They feel like how my brain imagines a fantastical pirate adventure.
My only complaint is with the font used for some of the numbers. On the tiles, the numbers can be a little hard to read from a distance. The style is fitting for the theme, but my poor old eyes struggle with the numbers at times.
The standees, cards, map, and character sheets are excellent.
The gameplay is fairly light, but the decisions often feel consequential. This isn't a game on autopilot. You can lose easily if you're not careful. On the other hand, the rulebook is only 4 pages. Teaching the game is pretty easy. I'd consider it a good family weight game. All of the skill checks are based on dice rolls, so the game can be lucky. It's not a strategy game by any stretch. But your choices do matter, and you can improve your rolls with your decisions.
This game is co-op so you either win together or lose together. However, there are lots of cards and events that have you steal treasure and items from other players. This might turn some people off. For us, it seemed to fit the pirate theme and our backstories.
As you can see in the photo, the game can be a bit of a table-hog, and to a certain extent it is a little fiddly. Setup and teardown is also not exactly smooth. If you have a lot of bags for keeping everything separate, setup shouldn't take more than 5 or 10 minutes. Same with teardown.
This game is a crack up. There were multiple times in the first mission where the whole table was laughing. Some of the subject matter is not appropriate for younger kids. There's piratey murder aplenty. There's romance on the high seas. And there's lots and lots of alcohol consumption. I'd think that if your kids are old enough for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, they're probably old enough for this game.
The humor is kind of slap-stick humor. It's not overly sophisticated. Your character's back story is basically a Madlib and it will be as silly as you are, times 10.
My pirate character's backstory.
You can see on the website that there are 5 missions that come with the game. There's also a DLC story for $10 available. I'm still undecided about getting the DLC. We'll see after we've completed the 5 included missions. My group will likely take the mid-mission breaks so that's 10 gaming sessions. I consider that money well spent.
This game is a Pirate Paradise! If you like funny, adventurous, sometimes difficult, sometimes lucky story telling, this is the game for you. I consider this a great purchase. It will keep my family entertained for the next couple of months. I'm looking forward to seeing where the next missions take us.
I think this game would be an excellent choice if you have a gaming group that you meet with online. Only one person needs to purchase the game. I think it's awesome that the developers included the web remote-play mode with the game.
