Six-Sided Seas: A Rollicking Ride for Two Jack Sparrows
Design: Kroze Kresky
Art: Megan Cheever
Publisher: Solis Game Studio
Players: 2 (or more with multiple copies of the game)
Age: 14+ (according to the box), but 8 year olds should be fine with it
Time: 20 minutes
If you have half an hour, you can learn and have a jaunty time with Six-Sided Seas, a game where you can launch cannonballs at your opponent or store resources for a larger attack later. At the same time, it has learned from the Bruno Cathala school of two-player game designs in that it has three different victory conditions.
The game comes with a neoprene game mat, a slew of six-sided dice, two tokens for tracking your loot, and a clear instruction booklet. You can be playing within 5-10 minutes of opening the box, which is critical for a game of this weight,
The two opposing ships start with 12 hit points, recorded by taking two of your dice, rotating each to 6, and placing them on their spot on the game mat. Then the starting player gets 12 coins, marking it with the included token. The second player gets 13 coins. There are rules for 3 & 4 players, but they require owning multiple copies of the game, which I don’t have access to.
There are three ways to win the game, crush your opponent by reducing their hitpoints to 0, gain more than 21 coins, or control four of the six islands at the start of your turn (not just taking the fourth island).
Each player turn is two phases, rolling and then placement. In most cases, you can place all the rolled dice on their ship.
Each turn starts with the active player rolling a die. The value of the die rolled is the value of that worker. You then have to choose whether or not to roll another die or stop. To determine the value of their dice workers. The bust level is determined by the number of coins you have. If you are the first player and you roll a 4, you can roll again because even rolling a 6 will not cause you to bust. If you do roll a 6, you now have a total of 10. Do you roll again?
If you roll a 1 with your third die (total = 11), you can keep going or stop.
If you stop, you move on to the placement phase, discussed below.
If you roll a 2 with your third die (total = 12), you exactly matched the number of coins and get a small bonus (add a coin to your loot – moving the coin token up to 13 OR rolling an additional die without busting) before moving on to the placement phase, discussed below
If you roll a 3 or more on your third die (total = 13+), you busted and go overboard – this means you take up to three dice of different numbers and place them on the evade space on your ship. Busting is a bummer, but does permit you to protect your ship from the enemy’s attack.The downside is that you place dice on the evasion space and then end your turn.
The placement phase involves placing dice on your ship and/or take actions, in any order. The legal placements are defined by what is written on the mat. They range from loading a cannon to simple cannons, which knock points off their HP. You can see that the Fore Cannon only permits a 3 or 4 on that space.
These are the main spaces on the ship.
There are two special spaces on the ship, Evade and Hold. The Evade is filled when you bust when rolling or when you place dice in those spaces during the second phase. Each hit you take from a cannon can be blocked by discarding a die from your evade space. Note that the Ram action cannot be evaded, but requires all three of the evade spaces to have dice to trigger.
Hold is a special space that can hold one die to carry it over to the next turn. It is not rerolled or counted against your die total for busting and going Overboard, which is great for flexibility. Unlike many worker placement games, you cannot remove a die once you have placed it, so partially filling a space and limiting your future options is risky.
Note that we have covered how to gain loot (exact match when rolling dice and the Plunder action) and how to damage your opponent (Cannons and Ram), we have not touched on the islands in the center of the mat. There are six islands that can be taken over with the Explorer space on your ship (a three die straight).
The rules for the six islands are very clear and permit creative die manipulation, but dedicating dice to exploration to gain these abilities means you are not hitting your opponent’s ship or protecting your own.
Interactivity comes from the Main Cannon and Send Grog both let you block an opponent’s space, kicking out the die there if they placed it in a previous turn. This makes the long multi-turn investment somewhat risky.
My Thoughts
We had a good time with Six-Sided Seas. What started as a basic game of hitting each other ended up with us taking chances to try to use the other spaces. The Ram action is quite strong, but takes a while to prepare for, so your opponent can guess what is coming and thwart it.
The interaction is pleasant and the game never overstayed its welcome. When someone started to feel behind, it was a few turns before the game ended. Luckily, some of those games included a reversal of fortune.
This is an ideal bar game. The board could even be printed on a table and you just need dice and a token.
Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers
- I love it!
- I like it. Jonathan F.
- Neutral.
- Not for me…
