You’re just a sea dog now, but you have big plans: one day they’ll call you Dread Pirate! But first, you’ll need to hire some crew, plunder settlements, and amass a fortune to bury.
In “Reaping the Rewards,” I take a look at the finished product from a crowdfunding campaign. Tiny Epic Pirates was originally funded through Kickstarter in June 2020, and was delivered to backers in the spring of 2021, and is available for purchase now. This review is adapted from my Kickstarter Tabletop Alert, updated to reflect the finished version.
Tiny Epic Pirates is a game for 1 to 4 players, ages 14 and up, and takes 45 minutes to play. The base game retails for $25, and the deluxe edition is $35, with other add-ons available like custom dice and playmats. You can purchase the deluxe edition and add-ons directly from Gamelyn Games. I would say that kids younger than 14 could also enjoy this, as long as they have some experience with modern board games. Thematically, there’s nothing that’s particularly inappropriate for kids, other than, you know, plundering settlements and stealing booty from merchant ships.
Tiny Epic Pirates was designed by Scott Almes and published by Gamelyn Games. Illustrations are by Felix Wermke, Nikoletta Vaszi, Ian Rosenthaler, and Chip Cole; graphic design was by Benjamin Shulman; 3D modeling was by Emerson Matsuuchi.
The copy sent to me was the deluxe edition. I was also sent a set of the custom skull dice, the playmats, and the Curse of Amdiak expansion, though this review will focus primarily on the base game.
Here’s what comes in the box:
The items called “mats” in the component list are oversized cards, similar to those found in other Tiny Epic games, and the items called “cards” are Euro-style mini-cards, about half the size of a typical poker card.
The pirate ship models are fun—each pirate ship can hold 3 of the booty cubes, and the merchant ships can hold 1 cube. It can be a little tricky getting the center cube in the pirate ships, because it drops down between the two flags. The ships have some nice details on them: the sails on the pirate ships feature the Jolly Roger, and the sails on the Navy ship have a crown.
The map mats have ocean in the center and land in the corners, illustrated so that when you lay out the cards, it forms islands at the intersections of the corners. The islands have various little details corresponding to the locations: settlements to plunder, markets to sell goods, coves to hide out, and so on. There are some fun details in the artwork that you’ll enjoy if you look closely. The icons were a little small in the prototype; the anchors have been enlarged, but most are still about the same size. The search tokens have a blue background, which can blend into the blue water.
The game comes with some grey pearlized dice, but the add-on custom dice are pretty fun, too: they’re black with yellow pips, and the 2 face looks like a skull. There are also minuscule skulls on the corners of the dice as well.
The four booty types (sugarcane, rum, coffee, and gunpowder) are represented by the four colors of cubes, but I found that the purple and brown in particular were a little close in color, depending on the lighting. I’d been hoping these colors might be tweaked a little for the final version, but the finished copy uses the same colors.
The captain and crew cards feature a lot of different pirates with different weapons or other accessories. I’m happy to see a broad range of people represented, including a few Asian pirates! I also liked that the women aren’t all made into stereotypical “sexy pirates.” There are enough crew cards that you’ve got a few that are pretty and handsome and look a bit flirty, and some that look threatening, and so on. Kudos to the art team for those.
The ship’s wheel on the helm mat has icons for the various actions you can take, but you also place your captain and deckhand meeples onto those spaces. Since the icons are printed in the center of the tiles, your captain and meeples tend to cover up those icons unless you remember to place them off to the side. The reverse side of the helm and legend maps are used for the solo game.
The wooden tokens are all custom shapes: the legend token is a skull with a captain’s hat and a dagger in its teeth. The sure-fire tokens are little wooden cannons, and the captain and deckhand meeples have hats and bandanas. Note that the captain meeple is a bit smaller than a standard meeple, and the deckhand meeples are truly tiny! The gold doubloons got upgraded to metal coins, thanks to the Kickstarter campaign.
Overall, the components are of the quality I’ve come to expect from Gamelyn Games: there’s a lot packed into a tiny box, and I’m always impressed by how much they can fit in there. With Tiny Epic Pirates, you do need to be careful with the ships: the sails come detached and the masts are very tiny, so I’m trying to be extra careful not to cram things too tightly so I don’t snap a mast. I do think there are some legibility issues like the color similarities for the booty, and the search tokens being hard to see, but for the most part it’s pretty good.
The Deluxe Edition also includes the Crimson Silver mini-expansion, which includes:
It’s hard to tell from this photo, but the “crimson silver” cubes are a deep red, with just a little bit of a sparkle to them—maybe not quite as much silver as intended, but they’re not a flat red. The solo mats are double-sided, with solo information on both sides, which means that this adds two more options for each half for the solo game.
In case you’re interested in the playmat, here’s a photo showing the base game setup on the game mat (a $30 add-on). The central area has 16 spaces marked for the map board, with an overlapping 4×5 grid for use in the Curse of Amdiak expansion. There are spaces for the various tokens, the crew (and Skeleton crew from the expansion), the market board, and the merchant ships. It seemed odd to me to have a printed space for the market card rather than having that printed directly onto the playmat itself. There isn’t a reserved space for the booty bag or the dice.
You can also get a pack of 4 player mats for $25, replacing the legend and helm cards. As you can see from the photo above, the player mat is a good deal larger than the two side-by-side cards. The wheel itself is the same size, with cutouts for the order tokens, which is a neat touch—you won’t have to worry about them sliding or getting bumped. The rest of the graphics are enlarged a bit from the card, and with a bigger margin around the edge, so the gold doubloon fits entirely on the mat rather than overlapping the edge. There’s also space at the bottom for your captain and up to 4 crew cards.
Of course, one of the things I love about Tiny Epic games is that they’re, well, tiny. For playing this at home, I may get out the mats because they are quite nice, but I’m probably less likely to take the playmats for a game night elsewhere, simply because it adds two more boxes (one of which is quite long) to carry.
There’s a video tutorial on the Kickstarter page, or you can download the rulebook here.
The game is a race to bury three treasures, with some tie-breaker rules in case multiple players manage to do that on the same round.
Shuffle the map cards and lay them out in a 4×4 grid to form the playing area, and then shuffle the search tokens and place one on each card. Return the rest of them to the box. Put the port tokens in opposite corners of the map, with a merchant ship at each port facing the opposite port. Put a random booty cube from the bag on each merchant ship. The starting player places the Navy ship in one of the corners that does not have a port.
Shuffle the crew cards and lay out 3 face-up next to the deck. Place sure-fire tokens and dice nearby.
Place the market mat nearby and put one cube of each color in the market spaces in random order. Organize the merchant ship cards in value from lowest (2) to highest (8), and then put one card in each space below the market mat.
Each player gets a helm mat and a legend mat, along with various tokens. You start with 1 gold, tracked with the doubloon token on the edge of the legend mat. Your three treasures are placed at the bottom of the legend mat, and your legendary token is placed on the lowest spot of the legend chart, “Sea Dog.” Shuffle your action tokens and place them randomly onto the five open spaces on your ship wheel. Put your captain pawn on the “0” space of the ship’s wheel (with the anchor), one deckhand on each of the deck assignments (Rigging, Cannons, and Extort), and the last deckhand on the “Corsair” space of the legend chart. Each player also receives a captain card at random, placed next to your mats.
Each player receives a booty cube—the first player receives the cube of the lowest value, second player receives the next cube on the market chart, and so on. In turn order, each player places their ship in an empty cove spot (marked with an anchor on the map).
The ultimate goal of the game is to bury treasure, for which you’ll need to amass gold and then get to an appropriate spot on the map—all of your actions should be driving you toward that, along with raising your legendary level (which gives you certain bonuses but also serves as a tie-breaker).
On your turn, you’ll move your captain pawn, sail your ship, and then take an action. Depending on your captain and crew, you may also get to take bonus actions.
Your captain moves clockwise around the wheel. On your turn, you must move your captain, and it moves one space by default, though you are allowed to skip over the anchor space for free. If you want to move further along the wheel to take a different action, you may spend deckhands from the bottom of your helm mat (from both “Deck Assignments” and “Repair”), placing them onto the spaces you are skipping over. You can skip over previously placed deckhands, which are then moved to the assignment spaces (but cannot be used to skip additional spaces on the same turn). In the example above, the red player’s captain started on space 5, skipped over space 0 for free, skipped over space 1 by placing a deckhand there, and landed on space 2.
You may then move your ship—your maximum speed is based on your legendary level (Sea Dogs can sail 1 space) plus the number of deckhands you have assigned to Rigging. Movement is orthogonally from card to card, and you can sail into and through spaces with other ships. Some of the spaces have storms—if you sail into a storm, you get jostled, and must move a deckhand into Repair. (Deckhands must come from assignments first, and then from your wheel. If all of them are in Repair already, then you may not sail into a storm.)
Then, you take the action according to the space your captain is on: Plunder, Trade, Crew Up, Search, Attack, or Hide.
Plunder (crossed swords) allows you to plunder a settlement, marked on the map with crossed swords. You’ll gain either 1 or 2 cubes (depending on the location) at random from the bag and place them on your ship, which can hold up to 3 cubes. If you have too many, you decide which cubes to jettison (returning them to the bag).
Trade (hand) allows you to sell booty at a market, marked on the map with the hand icon and a resource type. You can sell any number of cubes of that particular type, earning gold according to the good’s current market value (shown on the market mat). The cubes are returned to the bag. The good you just sold drops to the lowest price in the market, pushing the others up.
Crew Up (face) can be done at any location, because there are always people lounging about wanting to join a pirate crew. Choose one of the three face-up crew cards and put it next to your player mats. You may (once per turn) spend a gold to clear the crew market and draw three new cards before taking one. You may only have 4 crew cards (in addition to your captain), and may discard crew members to make room for new crew as desired. Also, once during the game, when you take the Crew Up action, you may mutiny, flipping your captain card over to its opposite face (and flipping your legend token to the bloody side).
Search (telescope) lets you pick up a search token from your location if available. Some search tokens give you an immediate reward of gold, booty, or a sure-fire token. Others are kept to be spent later, providing a 2 speed boost or allowing you to sail into a storm without getting jostled.
Attack (cannon) is used to fire at either a merchant ship or another player in your space. (The Navy is invincible and cannot be attacked.) You roll dice (either 2 or 3, depending on your legendary level) and compare them to the dice shown at the top of your captain and crew cards. Each match is a hit, plus each deckhand you have assigned to Cannons is a hit. (If you have two “3” values showing on your crew, then a “3” die result would count as 2 hits.) Some crew abilities also add hits. You may then spend sure-fire tokens to change a die to whatever face you want. To defeat a merchant, you must roll higher than its attack value. To defeat another player, the defender rolls after the attacker and the higher total hits wins.
If you defeat a merchant ship, you get the booty it is carrying, plus the gold value from the card, and potentially go up in legendary status (also based on the merchant ship card). The merchant ship flees to the port farthest from you and gets a new booty cube. The corresponding merchant card is discarded and replaced from the deck. If you defeat another player, you do not take anything from them, but you go up in legendary status. Whenever you go up in legendary status, you gain the windfall bonus immediately.
If you tie with a merchant or another player, you get a sure-fire token. If you lose to a merchant or another player, you get a sure-fire token and are also jostled, moving a deckhand into Repair.
Hide Out (anchor) allows you to hide if your ship is on an empty cove space (marked with an anchor). Place your ship into the cove, and you are now protected from all attacks until your next turn. You may then reassign all of your deckhands into Rigging, Cannons, and Extort. (Each space may have any number of deckhands.)
Your captain and crew may provide bonus actions. After completing your primary action, if your captain pawn is on a space that matches one of your crew member’s trigger, then you may take the bonus action shown (even if you didn’t actually use the primary action).
The captain card also provides one more important action that isn’t present on the wheel: Bury Treasure! To bury treasure, you must be at a space marked with a treasure chest, the Navy must not be present, and your captain pawn must be on the Search action so that you can earn the bonus actions. Spend 12 or 13 gold (according to the map icon) and place one of your treasure chests over that icon. Nobody else may bury at that spot now. (There are also some crew members that provide bury treasure as a bonus action based on other primary actions.)
At the end of your turn, you check if your captain pawn crossed over the ship line (between 5 and 0) on your turn. If so, then two things happen: first, you gain 1 gold for each deckhand assigned to Extort. Then, the merchant ships move, and the Navy moves. The player to your right moves the ships. Merchant ships move 2 spaces, and always sail toward the port they’re facing—if they reach it, they turn around and face the other port. The Navy ship moves toward the active player (who just finished their turn), and its speed is determined by the number of treasures that player has buried. If the Navy ship enters the active player’s space (and they’re not hiding in a cove), it attacks, jostling all of their deckhands into Repair. You don’t get a sure-fire token when the Navy hits you.
Once a player has buried 3 treasures, that triggers the last round of the game. Each other player will get one more turn, and then the game ends.
If only one player buried 3 treasures, they win the game! If multiple players have buried 3 treasures, the player with the highest legendary status wins. Further ties go to the player with more gold, and then more booty on their ship.
During setup, the floating fortresses are placed in the corners that don’t have merchant ships in them, and the crimson silver cubes are set aside in a supply. The Crew cards are shuffled into the deck.
The crimson silver is a wild booty that can be traded as any type (and is placed back into the supply). When you’re at a location with a floating fortress, the actions are slightly different:
After using a fortress, it moves clockwise on the map (skipping over a space with a fortress), and also triggers the Navy as if you crossed the ship line.
The two solo mats included in the mini-expansion are used for the solo game, explained below.
For the solo game, you’ll set up an automated captain using the backs of a helm card and a legend card. The helm card looks similar, but you’ll notice a few differences: there are dice values and ship icons around the edge of the wheel, and some bonus actions listed across the top. The Legend card is quite different, with a rondel showing 4 actions, rather than the legendary track. The combination of legend and helm card will give you a unique opponent, so there are lots of different possibilities.
On the AI captain’s turn, you roll a die to see what action they take: they’ll move as far around the rondel as they can to get to the number rolled, using deckhands when possible. They’ll sail toward their target (either you or a merchant, depending on the icon next to the space) and then do the action listed, along with the bonus at the top, if applicable. On a roll of 6, they’ll use the rondel on the legend mat instead.
The AI Captain also gains bonuses as it buries treasure, which it does automatically each time it accumulates 12 gold.
Tiny Epic Pirates is GeekDad Approved!
I’ve played every Tiny Epic game that Scott Almes and Gamelyn Games have cooked up so far, and although I feel like some are better than others, each one impresses me in at least two ways: first, the amount of gameplay that fits into a compact box; second, the way that each game uses very different mechanisms and not just different themes. This is now (if I’m counting correctly) the 11th game in the series, excluding expansions, and it uses some ideas that have not been present in previous games.
But let’s get back to my first point. You probably know from my other reviews that oversized boxes are one of my pet peeves. To be clear: I’m not against big boxes themselves—I’m against boxes that are much too big for the game they contain, that have more room for expansion than will ever be needed, that take up way too much precious shelf space in my (okay, yes, ridiculously large) collection. The Tiny Epic series is one of the few that goes in the other direction, making the small size a selling point, and that’s part of the reason they get my enthusiastic support. Their boxes are small, but they cram it full, and the game itself can still rival big-box games once you break everything out. The map for Tiny Epic Pirates is basically a full-sized game board, just broken down into cards; since each player has two oversized cards in this game, this may be one of the bigger table hogs in the series.
I know the games aren’t for everyone, though. Some people simply prefer a folding board and sturdier player mats, and I know there are those who aren’t fans of the tiny custom meeples that are often used for resources in the series. Tiny Epic Pirates does make use of oversized cards for the boards, but it has fewer tiny resources that might slide around. The gold doubloon is the only thing you’ll need to move up and down on the resource track in this game. The booty cubes are pretty tiny so that they fit on the ships, but you don’t have to be quite as careful about accidentally shifting your player mat. Your tolerance for cards as boards and the half-sized cards will likely affect how much you enjoy the game.
Tiny Epic Pirates is the first in the series to use a rondel for your actions, in the form of the ship’s wheel. Your captain goes around and around, taking those actions in order unless you commit deckhands to skip over spaces. I like the fact that each player’s wheel is arranged randomly, so players will not have the same order of actions. That forces players to figure out their own tactics, because you can’t just copy somebody else easily. I feel like there may be certain arrangements (or at least certain sequences within the arrangement) that might be more advantageous than others, but I’ve only played a handful of times so far so that’s just a guess. For instance, having a Trade action not too far after a Plunder would let you ditch goods quickly in case you’re able to collect more in other actions. On the other hand, having Trade immediately after Plunder might not give you enough time to sail to the correct market.
I like the tension between assigning your deckhands to the action spaces and using them to skip actions. Each of the actions is useful. Rigging, to increase your speed, is particularly helpful when you’re low on the legendary track, because moving only one space per turn feels painfully slow. Cannons are vital for attacking, of course, but also for defense: if you have nobody assigned to cannons, you’re likely to be an easy target, allowing other players to level up at your expense. Extorting is an odd one—it’s a good way to make a few bucks, but only once per circuit on the wheel, and the rest of the time they’re just sitting there.
Of course, you’ll want to skip over actions from time to time, too. Chances are, your best move isn’t always going to be the next one on your wheel. Maybe you need to go unload some rum at the market before another player sinks the price on it. Maybe you’re in a perfect spot to bury some treasure. Maybe there’s a merchant ship nearby and you want to attack it before it moves again. Whatever the case, it’ll cost you deckhands to jump to your optimal action, taking them away from their useful assignments.
Optimizing your actions can be a fun puzzle, and I like trying to plot out the order of actions to get the most of my turns, figuring out how to get my deckhands to their assignments at just the right time. It reminds me (just slightly) of playing Scythe, where you ideally want to do both the top and bottom actions if you can line everything up just right. Here, you want to take advantage of the next action on your wheel if you can, but you also want to figure out the best place for your ship to be for each action you have coming up.
And then there are the storms. Sailing through a storm is annoying because it jostles your crew, so you start losing those precious assignments. Depending on the map, you might have the option to take the long way around, but I’ve also had maps where it was cut up into three safe sections, and you were forced to cross storms to get to certain markets. The upside, though, is that the stormy cards also provide more booty when you plunder, and have bury spots that only require 12 gold instead of 13.
Leveling up on the legendary track isn’t mandatory, but it’s certainly helpful: at the very least, being able to move 2 spaces instead of 1 feels like a big difference, particularly late in the game when spots to bury treasure start filling up or the search tokens are few and far between. You do get gold for several of the spaces on the track, but there’s also a space where you earn a fourth deckhand, and that can be incredibly helpful. With 4 deckhands, you can even take the same action every turn (since you can skip over Hide Out for free). And, of course, legendary status is the tie-breaker if multiple people bury all their treasures. Attacking merchant ships is typically easier (or at least a known quantity) than attacking other players, but it only moves you up the legendary track once you get to the more powerful merchants. (The fewer players there are, the sooner merchant ships will earn you legendary status. In a 4-player game, you don’t level up unless you attack an 8-power merchant.) In the games I’ve played, we’ve had varying degrees of legend. Nobody has made it all the way to Dread Pirate, though we’ve had a couple of Swashbucklers. In another game, only two people made it to Pirate (level 2) and everyone else stayed at Sea Dog.
I did think it was a little weird at first that you never lost gold or booty when you lost a fight—in fact, you gain a sure-shot token to help you in the next fight—but as it turns out, getting jostled is enough of a punishment as it is, especially if you were relying on that Rigging deckhand to get you where you wanted to go.
The crew that you assemble can help you in several ways. One, of course, is in battle: the more crew you have, the more damage you can do. You can choose between trying to get lots of different numbers, so you can guarantee that each die will match and score a hit, or you can try to focus on a few numbers, so that you can do several hits with a single die if you’re lucky (or spend a sure-fire token).
Don’t underestimate the bonus actions, either! This is another aspect of the game that has been really fun to see in action. Some crew members give you bonuses like being able to re-roll certain dice in an attack or selling specific goods for a set price. But most give you additional bonus actions, making those spots on your wheel even more effective. You want to zip around and snatch up all the search tokens? Get a bonus action that lets you search, and now you essentially have two of them on your wheel. Don’t like where your trade action falls on the wheel? Hire a crew that lets you trade after you search! One player built up a crew that let him search, bury treasure, plunder, and then move and sell his newly acquired plunder—all in a single turn.
Even in just the handful of times I’ve played Tiny Epic Pirates, the games have felt different: I’ve had aggressive games where everyone was committing their deckhands to cannons, and I’ve had games where players earned most of their money from selling booty at the markets instead. I’ve seen different strategies lead to victory, and most of the players have been pretty close at the end (though we did have one who got significantly outpaced on the legendary track and had trouble catching back up). There have been those who assign deckhands and try to avoid getting jostled, and those who have their deckhands on the wheel or in Repair for most of the game. I like that (at least so far) we haven’t found a dominant strategy, so there’s room to play around and figure things out for yourself.
One potential downside is that the last round can feel unnecessary to some players, depending on how close they are to burying their third treasure. If you’ve got almost enough gold to bury on your last turn, there are different ways you might gamble—perhaps you’ll find just enough gold with your search action to bury your last treasure, or maybe you have a bonus action that lets you sell some booty and then bury. However, if you’re nowhere near 13 gold when somebody buries their third treasure, you know it’s all over for you, because you’ll only get one more turn. I like the fact that there’s room for a lucky chance to catch up but that it’s a slim chance. It does feel bad if somebody’s last turn can’t make a difference in their standing in the game, though fortunately that’s only one more round.
At the time I reviewed the prototype, we had started quarantine so I had to resort to playing Tiny Epic Pirates primarily over videochat—it wasn’t ideal, but with some labels and visual aids we made it work. I’d expressed the hope that by the time the finished game arrived, we’d be playing games in person again. Well, that lasted for a brief moment before we battened down the hatches again (at least until our youngest can get vaccinated), so—alas—I’m back to online gaming again for now. I’ve just recently gotten myself a Vorpal Board, which may help my remote players view the map more easily, and also make it possible to track what other players are doing, the two biggest difficulties I encountered with my video setup.
Even at the time I wrote about the Kickstarter, and even playing over video instead of in person, I was already really excited about Tiny Epic Pirates, so I’m thrilled to give it our GeekDad seal of approval, and I’m looking forward to the time I can actually break this out with some friends around the same table. Although pirates aren’t generally my favorite theme, I’ve really enjoyed the way that Tiny Epic Pirates works. It’s a clever use of a rondel for the actions, leading to some good, tough choices for the players. I also like that it’s more of a race game than a scoring game, so it’s more about taking the right action at the right time rather than trying to squeeze one more victory point out of a turn. Scott Almes has delivered yet another excellent entry in the Tiny Epic series.
For more about Tiny Epic Pirates or to order a copy, visit the Gamelyn Games website.
Click here to see all our tabletop game reviews.
Disclosure: GeekDad received a copy of this game for review purposes.
This post was last modified on September 29, 2021 8:03 pm
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