‘Pirates Of The High Teas’ Board Game Review
Image Source: Pink Hawk Games
Have you ever wanted to be a pirate? Or more specifically, a pirate who loves high tea with all the exotic tea varieties and delicious tea time dishes? Guess what? Now you can! With Pink Hawk Games board game adventure: Pirates of the High Teas.
CultureSlate was privileged to be able to play a test copy, and we had an absolute blast doing it! Let us tell you all about it, and when you’re done, we know you’ll want to go straight to Kickstarter to back this amazing game. And, it will probably leave you craving tea and finger foods so beware and maybe have a kettle on just in case.
Pirates of the High Teas is a one to four-player game. Yes, it can be played as a solo player, which can be so hard to find outside of card games or small pocket travel games. Technically, the main game mechanic is really beautifully sensory-pleasing cards, so in a sense, a card game, but it’s so much more than that. And it is super neat that you can play this game with friends or alone and still have an absolute blast.
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Image Source: Pink Hawk Games
The game mechanics do differ between the solo, two-player, and the three and four-player games but the variations help the game to run pretty much the same way so you’re still getting the full effect of the gameplay and story. We recommend playing solo, finding a partner, and finding a small group and trying it each way! There’s even a more advanced player mode where the game adds in a couple more rules, ways to earn extra doubloons, and these cool Captain-specific cards so you actually have a character you’re serving tea to!
As mentioned above, the cards themselves are full of beautiful drawings done by M.G. Patiño, Ammon Anderson, and Oleksandra Shchaslyva. They’re sturdy and have a nice feel to them. The player pieces, or Meeples, are pirate-shaped and sturdy as well. Everything is very colorful. Pink and purple are the base colors, but it’s such a beautiful game with colors all across the rainbow.
Each player board contains the steps you take each round as well, which is super helpful so you don’t have to keep referring to the directions. The game boards are small enough that you can most definitely play on half a coffee table (which, we did), but are easy to see and spread out over a larger surface. A lot of the game pieces in the test game were still a work in progress, so the finished game will be even more polished in terms of color, feel, and quality of the pieces.
Image Source: Pink Hawk Games
The rule book is easy to read and understand. As someone who takes a little longer to understand how to play games just by reading the rule book, I was worried I would be confused, but I wasn’t. The learning curve was fast, and we were able to pick up everything within one or two rounds of playing. The finished rule book will have more pictures to help with describing each step and each game piece and mechanic, which will also help others who don’t always learn by reading. Overall though, very easy to pick up and play. This is even very easy for children as well, so it would be a fun family game along with game night with your friends.
The basic steps of the game is that it is divided into nine rounds. Each round there are three different things you can do as a player, and you choose which one or ones you’re going to do. To put it in absolute basic terms: you either collect tea or food (or dishes as the game calls them) to make the meals for the Captain, or you can play your cards to feed the Captain. The tea and dish cards do go together, so you can be creative and find pairings that work well based on special icons on the card. It’s almost a matching game because the closer you get to fitting all the icons together between the tea and the food items, the more doubloons you receive. There is room for creativity in there as well, which makes it even more fun. There are 72 unique dishes and 30 unique teas. At the end of the nine rounds, the person with the most doubloons wins! Of course, there is a bit more to the game than this, but, overall, it’s a simple fun concept that can make for a quicker or slower game depending on how you want to play it.
Image Source: Pink Hawk Games
Pirates of the High Teas is on Kickstarter until April 17, and has already reached its goal and exceeded it by a ton! We highly recommend backing this game, whether the regular one or the special deluxe version that is only on Kickstarter! Pink Hawk Games is a small gaming company run by Emily Vincent, and this is the second game she’s designed. We interviewed her back at Origins Game Fair last year. You can read the interview here. Here is the link to the Kickstarter.
Come join the pirates as they drink their tea and eat yummy pastries. And at the same time, learn about all the cool real foods and teas of the world! There’s an amazing assortment of quite a few teas and pastries (savory and sweet!) that are popular all over the world, so you learn something and get to play a fun game in the process. And you will most definitely want to try some by the end. We didn’t make it through playing the game before we paused halfway through to make a cup of tea.
Rating: 10/10
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