Clik here to view.
Base price: $XX.
1 – 4 players.
Play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 1
Full disclosure: A preview copy of Pirates of the High Teas was provided by Pink Hawk Games. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Slow weekend, this time, but I finally have been able to get through the executive dysfunction keeping me from organizing my room and getting rid of a ton of things I want to get rid of. Largely, the dream, but we’re working on the more process-based elements of that. There are a few games I’ve been trying to get to, review-wise, so look forward to those, as well. I think this is my last big crowdfunding game for a while, so I’ll try to mix in more mini and micro reviews in the future, too. The goal is to get a few weeks ahead by Gen Con, if I end up going. Still wild to me that the “four biggest days in gaming” or whatever has such a profound commitment to making it impossible for press to get hotel rooms anywhere close to downtown, but hey, what do I know? All I’m saying is I never have this problem with PAX Unplugged. But before the entire review becomes about that, let’s talk about Pirates of the High Teas!
In Pirates of the High Teas, players are scoundrels and scallywags alike with only one goal: to serve their Captain a rather pleasant snack and tea combination. Pirates with big hearts, I suppose; there’s something to be said for that. So explore away and get great snacks and even better teas to keep the Captain and your crew happy! Also maybe get some lemons or something; scurvy is a real problem on the sea. I only recently found out what it does and man, that is an unpleasant experience. Will you be able to serve the best treats on the open ocean?
Contents
Setup
Setup isn’t too complicated. Choose the Ship Board for your player count:
Clik here to view.
Each player also gets a Treasure Chest Board:
Clik here to view.
Take a meeple of the matching color; at two players, take two of the same color:
Clik here to view.
Give each player one of each Gear Token, as well:
Clik here to view.
Pick a first player and have them place their meeple on the leftmost space of the Upper Deck. At two players, the other player places their next two and then the first player places their last one. Otherwise, fill the Upper Deck in clockwise player order. Then, shuffle the Dish Deck and deal two Dishes to each player:
Clik here to view.
Each player also gets one Tea Card:
Clik here to view.
Make a row of three Tea Cards above the Ship Board and five Dish Cards below. Then, collect the Doubloons into a supply:
Clik here to view.
One last thing: take the 2x Round Marker and place it on its corresponding space (unless you’re playing with two players; then remove it from the game), then shuffle the rest and place them, revealed (some will be blank), on the other spaces on the Round Tracker.
Clik here to view.
You should be ready to start!
Clik here to view.
Gameplay
Clik here to view.
Your goal is simple: best snacks on the whole ocean! But how do you get there? Each round is going to have four phases: let’s walk through them.
Round Bonus
This one’s simple. Discard the current Round Marker and claim any bonus, if pictured. If it’s the 2x Marker, set that on the Captain’s Quarter’s as a reminder, instead.
Deployment
Here you’re going to, from left to right in the Upper Deck, place your meeples on different action spaces on the board. Straightforward, but do not take the actions yet. They’re resolved later.
Clik here to view.
Actions
Now the meat of the game. From left to right on the Ship Board, each player will resolve their meeple’s action and then return that meeple to the leftmost empty space in the Upper Deck.
Different areas have different rewards, like giving you tea cards or crew tokens or snacks, but the crux of the game happens in the Captain’s Quarters. There, you deliver a set of one Tea Card and three (or more) Snack Cards. Generally it’s only three Snacks, but you can “Smash” a card behind another to give the card in front the rear card’s flavors, for various effects. When you deliver, you score the top, bottom, or center value on the Tea Card (center if you meet both conditions) and the total from the front Snack Cards in your set. Smashed cards don’t count; they got smashed. You then get a bonus depending on which space you chose. If you can’t serve a set, you don’t get any points or any bonus. Don’t do that.
Clean Up
To finish a round, players discard down to 5 Crew Tokens and 10 Cards in hand, then refill the various card rows. A new round begins!
Clik here to view.
End of Game
After Round 9, the game ends! Each player gets one more turn to serve a meal to the Captain for half points, but it must be a full meal. The player with the most Doubloons wins!
Player Count Differences
Not a ton here; I think Pirates does a nice job of balancing things via the Ship Board, modifying how things work or what’s available so that there’s always just a few spaces less than the number you’d like. It’s rude, but it works quite well for adding a bit of stress and strain to the game’s puzzle. There’s always some tension with drawing from a central and visible supply, but honestly, the Cannon Tokens make that essentially moot, as you can just refill any time on your turn if you’re unhappy with what’s there (and providing you have Cannon Tokens). I like that as a way of mitigating that dissatisfaction when someone takes the card you want; there are plenty more out there! No player count preference, as a result. There’s also a solo mode if y’all are into that.
Strategy
Clik here to view.
- Don’t overlook the cannons! Cannon Tokens are great because not only can you use them to refill a row that your opponents have picked clean, but you can also use them mid-action to refill a row if you don’t like what your remaining options look like! In games like this, sifting is almost always the right move. It lets you get the cards you need without having to spend extra actions or extra cards.
- Smashing cards, while inefficient, can still earn you a few points. It’s tough because you really want to use as few cards as possible, but you can make a lot of things work, especially given some of those high-value cards with no flavors on them. If you smash the flavor you need onto that, you’ve got a potent and valuable card that can score you a bunch of points!
- Mind the hand limit. This will come up a lot, but if you’re trying to fully-smash six cards and a tea, you don’t have a lot of room left in your hand for anything else. You also can’t entertain a lot of different options. If the cards aren’t immediately or imminently useful, dump ’em with the parrot.
- If you don’t think you’ll be able to score a set at the end of the game, using the parrot to sell off your remaining cards might be economical. It’s good during and towards the end of the game to get rid of cards you’d otherwise be discarding for free. It helps recoup some of those frustrating losses and turn them into less-frustrating gains. What a nice bird.
- Keep in mind where your placement will, in turn, affect your turn ordering. The later your action is in the line, the later you’ll go! It may not be worth the extra token to go behind other players, especially if they fill up all the delivery spots and you can’t get rid of a bunch of cards in your hand for points. You don’t always want to be stuck with extra cards in hand.
- Efficiency is the name of the game, here. It’s mostly a bit of resource management and pick-up-and-deliver, kind of, so your goal is, as mentioned, get the most points by delivering the most times and using the fewest cards per delivery. You, ideally, should be dumping three snacks and a tea each time until the end of the game, where you can deliver twice in one round. That’s hard to do! You’d need a ton of good luck to execute that perfectly.
- You don’t always need the perfect set. So don’t worry about it! Do what you gotta do to score points, and don’t overfill your hand looking for the perfect cards. Smash a few together! Take a lower-value set! You’ll figure it out.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The art is charming. I actually currently like that there’s a mishmash of realistic art and drawn art, but those are placeholder images for the real thing. I find the juxtaposition charming, but the drawn stuff is quite pleasant too!
- Not too difficult to pick up. I was worried about how the resource management elements would work, but making it super simple and keeping it to the cards and the types of cards actually makes the whole thing more digestible.
- I do enjoy the little pirate meeples; always a fun part of a game. If you’re going to do anything, having silly little pieces goes a long way in my book towards making that thing even better.
- I really like the different actions corresponding to turn order; it’s an elegant solution for that sort of thing. It turns everything into another calculation: is it worth it to go later next turn to take a potentially more valuable action now? And the answer sometimes has to be yes. That’s a fun little doozy.
- There’s such a fun variety of teas and snacks! Something for everyone; I hope there’s a little cookbook or snack guide that comes with the game for a guided experience. I did a few escape room games once that did something like that (they sent along paired drinks and snacks) and that was quite something.
- Always appreciate a solo mode and an advanced play mode to let players customize the game according to their preferences. Not saying the game needs to be harder or that solo modes are always good (and not not saying that either!) but I do appreciate when they’re included to let players tweak how they play. It’s essentially a polite set of house rules that are designer-approved, instead of the hellish ones we all made up for Monopoly.
Mehs
- I do wish there were more names floating around, like pirate names or ship names. I want to know everything about every character in the game. There’s nothing too obscure, and that’s the exact kind of weirdo I am.
- There will, inevitably, be some luck element that may frustrate some of your players. It can be annoying when the perfect card comes up for someone else. When it happens to you, though, it’s totally fine! It’s called a double standard.
Cons
- The theme isn’t immediately evident through the gameplay, but that might just be my assumption that pirate games tend either to be more combative or to have more direct conflict. I’m not personally opposed to cozy pirate games (far from it); I just wonder if there’s going to be some assumption disconnect. Like, caveat emptor and all that, but the primary color scheme screams “cozy” to me, not to mention the tea-themed elements of the game. I just think we need more cozy board games.
Overall: 7.25 / 10
Clik here to view.
Overall, I liked Pirates of the High Teas! I will at least concede that the theme surprised me a bit, just because this is a remarkably non-confrontational pirate game (and I usually just expect that a bit more, thematically). That said, just because it’s not the meanest game in town doesn’t mean that it’s not fun! Far from it; I had a very nice time playing this one. It’s a very pleasant theme, just collecting nice snacks and trying to find the perfect tea to pair them with, and that resource management is fun even when I’m cursing that ten-card hand limit because I want to have as many cards as possible in my hand at once. That tension is partially exacerbated because the game is, at its core, an efficiency puzzle: how can you deliver the most sets with the fewest cards for the most points? There’s a luck element to solving that, as there must be in games like this, and that might annoy some players (mostly if someone [as I did] draws the perfect set of cards for a combination and can immediately deliver on their next turn without any additional effort), but that’s kind of how things work in Busytown. A lot of where this game succeeds is in creating the proper environment for a deeply cozy pirate game, and there really aren’t enough of those. If that’s the kind of vibe you’re looking for, you need an accompaniment to Chai, or you just want a different take on the pirate theme, Pirates of the High Teas might be for you! It’s quite cute.
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support What’s Eric Playing? in the future, please check out my Patreon. Thanks for reading!