I’ll start off with what has changed between the first and second editions. The first big thing you’ll notice is the art style. The slightly darker pirate cover has been replaced with a much brighter and heroic style, with the gritty characters replaced with anthropomorphic animals. To me, that’s a great way to change perspectives.

To tell the truth, I did not expect to be buying another title from Stonemaier Games, especially so soon after having my fill of Scythe and Wingspan, growing weary of Tapestry, losing interest in Pendulum, and completely bouncing off of Red Rising. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with these games, it simply felt like my tastes and their offerings were diverging further apart. That is until the head of Stonemaier, Jamey, announced Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest—an updated design from one of my favorite creators, Paolo Mori—and he suddenly had my attention again. I’m about to break the publisher’s code and share a secret with the world that has been eating away at me for far too long… the secret? Game boxes are a lie. A whole cornucopia of lies, in fact. Winds of Galecrest however lightens everything up with bright art and family friendly anthropomorphic animal hybrids. It also feels very Stonemaier-esk with the flying ships — a frequent feature in many of their games. At the end of the third voyage, players compare their score dials to determine the richest sky pirate and winner of the game! Comparing scores at the end of the game.The two player variant in Libertalia Winds of Galecrest is…fine. It’s not bad, but it’s also not great.

Then the Dusk abilities are resolved beginning with the right most character and moving to the left. After a player has resolved their Dusk ability, they will select a loot token from the current day (if any are available) and add the loot token and their character card in front of them on their “ship.” However, if you plan for it, you can take advantage of the situation. If you play the Smuggler, you get to choose a loot token during the day phase instead, so you could force some other poor sap to take the hook. Or perhaps you just play the Bodyguard and discard all hooks and sabers for money instead. You could play the Scout and replace it once you have seen what cards everyone else chose. The only other component is a board plus some tiles to place on it to vary the effects of the loot tokens. It’s double-sided, printed with player aids and everything is laid out in a neat and effective manner to help facilitate the gameplay. Rules and How it Plays The reputation system is another subtle, but important aspect of Libertalia. If you and another player choose the same cards, the player with the higher reputation is considered the higher rank. Reputation also gives doubloons at the start of each round, the right most giving the least. The reputation system makes for an intuitive tie breaker and an unobtrusive scale to balance alongside the rest of the game. Of course, they’re trying to do the same to YOU! So you can never be fully sure that the card you’re playing is going to bring you the results you’re intending. Two Changes that Greatly Improve LibertaliaWe owned the original Libertalia and sold it a few years ago in one of our game purges. Now that we’ve played the new Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest, will it meet the fate of the original and find another home? Or will it find a permanent spot in our game closet? If you like games with a lot of player interaction and great variety, then we highly recommend getting a copy of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest! Full disclosure: A review copy of Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest was kindly provided by publisher Stonemaier Games. Components

I’m both amused and baffled by Reiner Knizia’s spicy new card game, Art Robbery. Amused because its a delightful game of double-layered thievery—a group of art thieves are fighting over their spoils like two jealous toddlers snatching away whatever toy is in the other’s hand. Baffled because Art Robbery successfully entertains me while sounding eerily similar to another game which I loathe—Cover Your Assets. First, day abilities are resolved in rank of lowest to highest. Secondly dusk abilities are resolved from right to left. Alongside any dusk abilities, players will choose a loot token from the matching day on the board too, activating any associated actions with these. Finally night actions are activated, these may be found on recruited characters on each player’s ship in front of them. This process is repeated for each day of the voyage. After the final day of a journey, each player resolves any anchor abilities. They also stash treasure away for safety in their treasure chest scorer and discards characters, coins and loot tokens from their ship. In other words, literally everything that has been changed about the gameplay itself feels like a huge step-up for me.Libertalia: Winds of Galecrest is a game of reading your opponents at the table and working out what others might play. With the added spice of varying degrees of take that everyone at the table is invested with a good level of player interaction. But even then, I had actually tried the original Libertalia for the first time ever last year and thought it was ok at best. My main gripes were that the design seemed to age poorly in terms of game length, graphic design, tiebreaker resolutions, strategic depth, and so on. Lo and behold, Winds of Galecrest was revealed along with what appeared to be smart solutions to all of the problems I had with the original game. So despite my primal instincts warning me to stay away, I couldn’t help but give Stonemaier Games and Libertalia another chance. In the timeless words of Aragorn: “For Paolo.” …or Frodo. Why not both? Let’s illustrate this with an example. Loot tiles aren’t all equal in value: indeed one, the Relic, costs you points if you collect it. So if there’s a day with a couple of Relic tiles among the loot and you have the rank 5 card Cabin Boy, you might be tempted to play it. The Cabin Boy’s “day” power nets you gold if he’s the leftmost card, which is likely given that he’s rank 5. At “dusk” he stops you from taking any loot which, if it’s a Relic, is quite helpful. So he looks like an easy choice: except all the other players will have a Cabin Boy and they’ll all be thinking the same thing. All of a sudden he’s not likely to be the leftmost card anymore, and you might want to reconsider. Unless all the other players are also thinking that same thing, in which case ... So while you can play at two, we don’t recommend Libertalia if you are planning on playing primarily at two. Or even three! Before starting a new voyage, players get six new cards for their hand -- and this is where things really start to heat up. Although all players get the same six cards, chances are they played different cards during the preceding voyage which means everyone is now holding different hands. This brings a memory element into the game as you’ll be at an advantage if you can recall what other players are holding; but either way, it opens up more variety in potential effect combos. Despite this fresh blood, the arbitrary nature of simultaneous play does make the hour-odd play time feel a little overlong.

The game is played over 3 voyages that each consist of days. The first voyage is 4 days and the next voyages each increase by 1 day. The next essential ingredient to Art Robbery’s success is the emphasis on timing. Because each round has a clear ending enshrouded in the mystery of who will trigger it, players must decide when they will pull the trigger and claim or steal a token in hopes of it remaining in their possession until the round end. If you sit on your best cards and wait too long to retrieve a token, then the round can suddenly end without you putting your hand to good use. The good news is that your hand does carry over from one round to the next, which provides another layer of long-term planning and hand management. To modify the game to play at two, you’ll add a little tile on top of the second and third card locations on the board. The tile features the midshipman. If a player ever plays a card that is directly to the midshipman’s left, their opponent will choose a loot tile to discard. However, because there were so few loot tokens for each round (only three) and often there were duplicates, the choices of which token to discard was often a non-choice. “Do you want to discard this barrel or this barrel?” The adjacency restriction feels limiting in a bad way. Maybe it was meant to prevent kingmaking or dogpiling, but it just felt like my agency was being taken away for arbitrary reasons. Especially because it only matters in player counts of four and higher. VerdictSomething to be aware of about the Automa in Libertalia, is that it’ll normally play it’s highest ranking cards (which makes sense), I thought I could get away with using my lower ranking cards to win when the Automa had already used a lot of their higher ranking cards but it was a no. Reputation doesn’t matter as much here as ties are uncommon, sometimes I think it’s better to plummet your reputation as it gives you more coins each round. At two players. Libertalia felt like a tight duel of wits, and the Midshipman tile reinforces this fact. The Midshipman is used during two-player games for both players to take advantage of. With only two of you, just two characters get played each day. However, the Midshipman has a rank of 20.5. If a character ends up being directly to the left of it, the other player gets to discard a loot token before they get to choose. At the end of each voyage, players activate any anchor abilities and score loot and doubloons (then discard them). Players keep any non-played characters in their hands for the next voyage but those in their ships are discarded. A new voyage begins as players add more characters to their hands to play on. The random combination of loot available will factor into which characters you choose to play on which days. Since the collection of the loot goes from the highest numbered card to the lowest, if there’s something you really want, you’ll want to play a higher card. But will that mess with your other plans of what you could gain from playing a different card first?