Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay

• Designers: Eilif Svensson, Asmund Svensson, Vergard Eliassen Stillerud
• Publisher: Chilifox
• Players: 1-4
• Age: 14+
• Time: 90-120 min
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

You have finally reached the archipelago of Scoundrel Bay! Here, amidst treasures and dangers, fortune awaits any crew daring — or foolish — enough to seize it.

In Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay, players are pirate captains who try to collect the most gold by conquering harbors, seeking hideouts, delivering crates, digging up treasures, and gaining reputation by fighting monsters. During the game, each player builds up their crew to unlock stronger actions such as digging for treasure, invading hideouts, and picking up and delivering crates. On your turn, play one card from your hand and choose one of three actions for it:

• Recruit
• Sail and shoot monster
• Invade

You may not pick the same action you took on your previous turn. The deck contains 84 unique, multi‑use cards, and every card works with all three actions. After each of five reefs, you resolve an event and feed your crew. The game ends as soon as a captain crosses the fifth reef. Sailing quickly shortens the game, but racing ahead might leave your engine too weak to claim victory.

Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay is a high interaction game in which players compete to gain area‑majority over lucrative islands, outpace foes in an open draft of crew cards, race to engage monsters before others can, and outwit captains in tense blind bids — all without resorting to negative or take‑that attacks.

Setup involves a LOT of bit placement.  Place the board on the table, and make a display of pirate cards at the bottom.  Place a matching monster onto each monster spot on the board, a treasure chit on each treasure space and a crate chit on each crate space.  

Each player gets their own board – this represents their pirate ship.  Players start with a hand of 3 pirate cards and they place markers on the underlined starting spaces of the five tracks.  A captain and 4 pirate meeples are placed in the active area as well as starting resources (doubloons dependent on initial turn order).  Each player places their ship in the first sea space of the board and the reputation discs are stacked at the start of the reputation track on the main board.  These are stacked in order of the number found on the player boards with the lowest number on top.  The player with the lowest numbered board also is the start player.

The turn structure is fairly simple. First you play a card and then take one of 3 actions: Recruit, Sail and shoot at a monster, Invade.  Then, you add a card to your hand.  Sounds simple, no?  Well in a bit more detail…

All of the cards have multiple functions – the Recruit action is seen across the top of the card, the Invade action seen in the upper left corner and the Sail/Shoot action at the bottom left.  You’ll have to consider all the different options on each of your three cards to find the best match.  To make things a bit more complicated (or perhaps a bit easier for AP people!) – you cannot repeat the same action type that you did on the previous turn.  If you cannot remember, the right side of your player board has action icons which you can cover to remind you what you did last turn.  We did not find that we needed to use this, but it’s there if you can’t remember!

To recruit – you place the card face up below your player board, in the column matching the crew color shown on the card. Move as many citizens as shown to the active pirates space of your player board. Gain tools as shown in the recruiting colored banner on the card.

To sail/shoot – you choose a card and place it to the right of your player board.  You now choose to move your ship 1, 2 or 3 spaces, and you will have to try to shoot the monster on the space where you end movement.  Additionally, you will get a choice of the three reward lines on the card, with the better choice coming with lower movement.  Now, reveal the info on the stand of the monster in the space you stopped movement in.  Roll the monster die and add it to the printed value on the stand to get the monster’s strength. Check to see if you have: 1) defeated the monster by having a higher gun level on your ship, and 2) did you take damage from the monster (if your shield value is less than the monster’s).  Note that a critical hit or critical miss are also possible outcomes from the roll.  Additionally, you can spend a pirate ring to re-roll the monster die.  Refer to the reputation board to show the rewards/losses that happen as a result of the fight.  Many rewards involve moving forward on the reputation track; and you will gain the bonus shows to the left of each step you take.

To invade – choose a card from your hand, the color of the flag in the upper left tells you what type of regions you will invade this turn.  Move at least 1 pirate from your ready area (up to a number equal to the number of flags in your matching color crew area at the bottom of your board) and then do the associated invasion action in each region that you invade this turn:

• Beach spaces allow you dig for treasure which provide instant benefits
• Villages let you collect crates which are placed onto your player board
• Harbors let you deliver crates, getting extra stuff if the letter on the crate matches the letter of the harbor. You can then trade food for other suff.
• Hideouts – let you place pirates on the board for endgame scoring

After you have taken your action, you add a card to your hand. There are two options – you can pay 0-2 rum to buy one from the market at the bottom of the board OR you can spend 3 rum, announce a flag color and then reveal cards from the top of the deck until your chosen color comes up and you are obligated to take that card.

The game continues in this fashion – and there are five different stages – each stage end when a player first crosses the gate on the board.  At the end of the turn when someone first crosses a stage line, a random event is revealed. Players now make a blind bid of doubloons.  The highest bid goes into the Scoundrel Bay money bag on the board. The lowest bid goes back into that player’s supply. All middle bids go to the general supply.

In the cases of reward events, the highest bid gets to choose the reward they want from the card, and so on down the line with bids.  Whichever player bid the least gets nothing. Ties broken by the position on the reputation table.  For punishment events, the player who bid the least suffers the penalty and everyone else just loses their money.

 Now it is time to cook and feed. Take food tokens equal to your space on the food track. Your captain must feed first and he takes 2. All other pirates take 1.  An unfed pirate becomes sick.  If a pirate was already sick, feeding him makes him active next round, but starving him again means that he dies.

The game then resumes its usual course until someone crosses the next threshold and this process is repeated again.  When someone crosses the fifth threshold, this triggers the end of the game.  Finish the current round and then play two more full rounds, and then the game moves into final scoring.

The goal is to have the most gold.  Essentially doubloons equal gold.  First, score Scoundrel Bay with bonuses and gold going to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd most number of pirates there.  Then score the other four harbors. Villages provide a simple 2VP per pirate. Hideouts score the product of the number of pirates in hideouts times the number of hideouts those pirates are in.  Finally, kill any pirates on beaches, and then for each pirate in the graveyard, move back one space on the reputation track, with an additional space backwards to the player with the most in the graveyard. Now score gold equal to your final resting space on the reputation track.  Take further penalties for ship damage and pirates that are sick at the end of the game.

The player with the most gold wins. Ties broken by position on reputation track.

My thoughts on the game

Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay is a game filled with contradictions. On one hand, it’s a game where each individual turn rarely takes more than a minute (well, sure there are some outlier turns, and one action which is far more complicated than the others) – but I’ve also yet to play a game of it that didn’t last two hours!  It’s a game that asks you to play pirates to the board to do this, but I’ve often seen players run out of those pirates before they are two-thirds of the way around the board!

As the tiny preview at the top of the review states, the bones of the game are simple… play a card and take one of three actions using the appropriate part of the card that you played.  Then, add a new card to your hand.  Rinse, lather, repeat until someone triggers the endgame by getting to the end of the seas.

There are lots of interesting decisions to be made with the cards.  As each card can be used in three different ways, you’ll constantly be choosing between your cards and the options on them to figure out the best path.  Again, the restriction of not repeating an action looms large here – you could be put in tough situations where you want to save a card for its recruiting action, but you may have to use it on an earlier turn because it’s the only card of the color you need for invading the space where you currently are!  Though it doesn’t get used a lot, the option of spending 3 food to call for a specific color of card is a very useful thing, and that rule should definitely not be forgotten.

The game rules actually suggest four different strategies (all around, end-game bonus focused, treasures, crates), and suggest that they are fairly balanced.  I’m not sure yet if I would agree with that take, but that could be a result of groupthink in my local group.  Admittedly, it’s hard to go super hard-core into anything as the game forces you to take a different type of action each turn.  That alternation of actions might be my favorite part of the game.  You’re constantly evaluating your plan, thinking at least two turns at a time because whatever you choose to do this turn will be blocked on the next turn, so you should ideally be planning two steps ahead at all times to make sure that you don’t screw yourself out of an action.

Each of the strategies has its strengths and weaknesses. Crates can have nice payoffs, assuming you can deliver them to the right place.  However, for a level 3 crate, note that it will take 3 pirates to pick it up from a village and then 3 pirates at the port to unload it for the bonus.  Of course, you’ll score points for each of those pirates left behind… but it can be a big cost to your limited and finite stock of pirates.  The treasure chests can be quite valuable as well, though they will also require pirates as well as maps.  The payoffs seem to be better than the crates, and you get them immediately – but then you’re tasked with the job of figuring out how to move the pirates off the beach before the end of the game lest they die of dehydration.

The Hideouts seem to be the highest scoring option in our games, though it does take a bit of buffing and map collecting to be able to drop pirates off in all the different hideouts.  Further, those pirates don’t really do anything else for you once they are in the hideout, so it’s best to be committed to that strategy if you go for it.

The game starts out with everyone tightly packed together at the start space, and players will often be recruiting often in order to pad their stats.  In general, we’ve preferred to recruit with the cards that provide 2 pirates and 2 track bumps; as this feels generally better than 3 pirates and only 1 bump.  Yes, yes, you need pirates to do things, but man, if you get too many pirates, you’ll end up with a huge food bill at the end of the round, and that’s no bueno.

While each boat starts out slightly different than the others in stats, all the boats are pretty much weak overall and it does take a few turns to buff up your fighting/defending powers.  This is important because you will be fighting on many of your ship movement turns – so buff first, sail later.  Also, once you start sailing, you’ll be incentivized to sail smaller distances because you get better bonuses with the shorter moves.  The end result of this is that many players often play a disproportionate number of pirates in the first chapter of the game – because they need to buff their ship AND they don’t want to sail yet until their ship is buffed… and since the game doesn’t allow you to repeat an action, it’s recruit then invade then recruit then invade…  

AND, because you certainly don’t make enough food at the start, you’re pushing those poor pirates off your ship as soon as you recruit them because lord knows there isn’t enough hardtack and gruel on your poor ship to feed them once you finally get off your duff and actually sail forward through the first barrier.

Once you get your ship stronger, you can venture out into the waters – but again, be sure you’re ready to do so… If you can’t defend yourself in a fight, you’ll kill off one of your pirates, and this is an unavoidable end-game penalty.  This is another big detractor to moving too far forward because the enemies get stronger and stronger as you move forward.   And, again, if you get into waters too soon, you’ll suffer lots of ship damage and lots of pirate deaths.

So, the game sort of incentivizes you to slow roll your sailing, and that’s generally fine, but man, it makes for a super long game.  Again, no turn really ever takes that long, but if you’ve moving one or two sea spaces say every 3 or 4 turns, well , it’s gonna take you a hella long time to get to the end of this lazy river of doom.  Everything in the game works fine, but all the turns feel the same after awhile. As each turn is really more of a micro-turn in the grand scheme of things, there is often never an “Aha!” turn where you pull together some great plan and see the benefits all at once.  

I feel like the game design wants you to move faster through the water, take risks when fighting – so that you get to the fourth and fifth stages of the game with enough pirates left to do interesting things at the end… but that just isn’t how it’s worked out in our games.  The penalties for rushing forward are too steep, and your pirates slowly meander along.  Normally pirates worry about things like scurvy and beri beri, but the pirates heading towards Scoundrel Bay have more repetitious and banal things that could take them out first..  

Fortunes of Scoundrel Bay has a lot of interesting ideas and lots of potential, but the game really wants to be about half as long as it turns out to be.  I have a strong feeling that the designers play a faster version of the game at their own table, but the rules as printed allow for the slow plodding game that happens around here, and I can’t see any reason why I’d change my strategy.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it.
• Neutral. Dale Y, John P
• Not for me…