Shiver Me Timbers is a highly thematic, strategic sandbox game set in the Golden Age of Piracy. The game is heavily Euro-inspired: It uses a tactical card-based combat system and takes lots of strategic planning to use your available actions to optimal effect and become the most notorious pirate of your era.
Each playing will vary as you randomly reveal five of ten vastly different victory conditions: One game, you'll be rescuing your lost family, the next you might have to conquer enemy ships and fortresses or face the hideous Kraken.
At the beginning of the game, each player secretly chooses two of the revealed conditions as their personal goals. After all players have chosen, they set-up the fully modular board, each of them trying to find a constellation that optimally supports their hidden agenda. Then they outfit their modable ship miniatures, select their starting abilities and equipment and set sails to fight, conquer, trade, loot, hunt for treasure and much more.
During play, every achievement is rewarded with victory points. The game continues until all five victory conditions have been met. There's a final scoring in which players collect extra points if they managed to achieve the goals they chose, and highest point total wins.
—description from the designer
Prep your cutlass and grab your compass as we dive into a high seas sandbox adventure and review Shiver Me Timbers.
Fifteen men on a dead man's chest! Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!