OUR REVIEW

A Pirate gang wish to retire

LIBERTALIA

Booty should be divided  

When Paolo Mori (an Italian game designer especially known for “Vasco da Gama”, “Ur”, Pocket Battles”, “Borneo”, etc.) approached Asterion Press (a young but very active games distributor of many games in my Country, all fully translated in Italian) this game was named Damascus and had and oriental/medieval feeling. After further test with a new team of players Damascus was refined and tuned, then Asterion contacted the well-known French company Asmodée and submitted this game to them.

Asmodée decided to manufacture it under their “core gamers” branch MARABUNTA (whose team already published the new edition of EVO under the now dead label Studio Descartes) but they decided to change the theme and to pass to … pirates, so the name was changed to LIBERTALIA, which is a mythical place where pirates dreamed that it was possible to live in peace and freedom.

LIBERTALIA is essentially a card game where the players becomes pirates and try to make an honest (???) distribution of the booty accumulated in years of dangerous life. The components are really beautiful, a usual feature of Asmodée production, and they invite you to start gaming as soon as possible.

The board is in shape of a sailing ship seen from a bird eye, including the port side firing guns: on this board are printed six card places and six booty locations. This is purely for giving some chrome to the game and you may even decide to play without the board, if you wish, but you will lose some feel.

Another square board is used to take track of the victory points (money!). The other components of the game are: six identical decks of 30 cards (in six different colors); 50 counters representing different booties; coins (doubloons) on three different values (1-5-10); a black bag to extract the booties; six markers and six flags in the colors of the players and 6 players boards depicting the isle of Libertalia with your ship and your cove.

Each player takes one personal board, a deck of cards, one marker and the flag of his color, ten doubloons … and the game may start. Then the six booty spaces are randomly filled, each one with as many counters (taken from the bag) as are players around the table. The younger player looks at his cards and must select 9 of them, telling his opponents the selected numbers (each deck has 30 cards numbered from 1 to 30).

Now the first of the 3 ROUNDS (weeks) that are necessary to play Libertalia may start.

A round is played in 6 phases (days: on Sunday no distribution is possible: even pirates must rest sometimes!!!): in each phase at “dawn” all the players put a card face down on the table and all the cards are revealed at the same time and placed on the ship in ascending order (from the lowest “1” to the higher “30”).

Each card has a name (nr. 1 is a “parrot”, nr. 18 is the “Cook”, nr. 29 is the “Captain”, etc.) a symbol (day, night, sunset, anchor) a number (from 1 to 6) and a special action (the Parrot allows you to change your card when all cards are already discovered; the Cook allows you to take a second booty, the captain gives you 3 doubloons immediately but oblige you to pay 3 doubloons for each cursed mask at the end of the round, etc.).If two cards of the same value are displayed then the small number (1-6) must be used to complete the ascending order.

Now the sun is high and pirates starts to work on board: in ascending order the special actions near the “day” symbol of the cards are executed (for example if you played the parrot you discard it and you select another card from your hand and put it on the board at his new placement).

After so many hours of hard work on the ship sunset arrives and it is finally time to distribute the available booty. In descending order (from the highest card) players decide which counter to pick-up and they add it to their personal loot and/or they execute the special action associated to the counter (see below).

The booty is composed of 50 counters:

-  4 coffers (value 5 doubloons)

-  6 jewels (value 3 doubloons)

- 10 “rum” barrels (value 1 doubloon)

-  8 treasure maps

-  6 Spanish officers

-  6 sabers

- 10 cursed relics

The booty for all six days was revealed at the beginning of the week and, of course, it is near impossible to find only “good” counters (coffers, jewelers, barrels) every day: so the players must try to use their top cards when it is absolutely necessary to take something good (for example the coffers) and may use less important cards when they may afford to take bad counters.

The treasure maps have no value, but if you collect THREE of them during the week you will gain 12 doubloons. This means that the days in which treasure maps are displayed usually see very hard fights between players that already have one or two of them

The Spanish officers oblige you to discard the just played card: so they are interesting to eliminate cards that have two different effects: positive during the week and negative at the week end (for example the Captain: when played it gives you 3 doubloons, but if you have it at the week-end you lose 3 doubloons per cursed mask).

The Sabers allows you to eliminate one card from the players on your right or on your left: so you will be able to oblige your … friends to discard a personage that will grant them many doubloons at the week-end.

Finally each Cursed Masks oblige you to discard 3 doubloons during the week-end

As you understand it is obvious that players usually take coffers and jewels, when available, but when you have barrels and special counters sometimes it is better to leave the barrel to the following players and attack (or defend) using other counters.

OK, the sun is gone, now and everybody is happy … or unhappy with his loot. All surviving Personages are placed on the personal board and, during the night those with a night symbol execute their action (gain some doubloons, discard some counters or cards to obtain doubloons, etc.). Please note that while the “day” actions are mono-use, the night actions are available even in the following turns, thus they are usually the target of the “sabers”.

After 6 days of disputes even pirates must rest: so it is also in Libertalia! During the week-end, while our men sleep, swim around the island or take a sun bath on the beaches we must make some mathematics to calculate the VP of each player.

On the Victory Points (VP) track each player add:

- 5 VP for each coffer of his loot

- 3 VP for each jewel

- 1 VP for each barrel

- 12 VP for each set of 3 treasure maps

From the total you subtract 3 VP for each cursed mask

Then all the counters are put back into the bag, to be mixed and redistributed to start the following round. All the personages on the cemetery (eliminated during play) or on the cove are discarded and each player remain only with three cards on his hand. All the coins are returned to the bank and each player gets 10 new doubloons. The younger player randomly draws 6 new cards from his deck and the other players extract the same cards from their decks to form a new hand of 9 cards.

 (Note that now all the players have 6 identical cards plus 3 cards from the preceding round: it is very hard to memorize which cards have not been played by your opponents, but it is important to take an eye on some of the most important. An example is the Cook that may take two loots in the same turn: if a player already collected one treasure map he may use the Cook to take TWO maps extra and thus gain 12 VP, so knowing who still has his Cook on hand is very important).

After three weeks (rounds) the game end and the player with most VP wins.

LIBERTALIA is a nice card game, very quick to play and with a real atmosphere. Even hard core gamers are happy to try it as an appetizer before starting a more demanding game, so I warmly invite everybody to try it.

Card games today seems to be the “all-time favorites” by a majority of gamers (if you look at BBG ratings you realize that most of the recent card games are in the top 100 games and/or they get hundreds of votes). My personal preferences go to a different type of games, so LIBERTALIA was a nice surprise because I was … urged to test it only as one player was missing, but after the first test I was the one who asked for an immediate … revenge.

Finally a little curiosity: most of the Pirates depicted on the box have the real “faces” of the designer, his father, the artist, the play-tester, etc.

Pietro Cremona

Players: 2-6

Age: 12+

Time: 60+

Designer: Paolo Mori

Art: Benjamin Carré, Stéphane Gantiez

Price: ca. 33 Euro

Publisher: Marabunta/Asmodee 2012

Web: www.asmodee.de

Genre: Card Game

Users: With friends

Version: it

Rules: de en es fr it

In-game text: yes

Comments:

Nice graphics

Standard topic

Good, quickly understood rules

Fast and rather easy to play

Compares to:

All card games with card placement for order decision and effects

Other editions:

English, French, German and Spanish at Marabunta

My rating: 6

Pietro Cremona:

With a good memory for cards played and a well-timed forgoing of a booty marker one can score a lot of points in this excellent card game.

Chance (pink): 1

Tactic (turquoise): 3

Strategy (blue): 1

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 2

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0