I'll be honest, I'd pretty much never even heard of Libertalia before Stonemaier Games announced the remake, Winds of Galecrest, but I did a bit of research and it was a game that I was intrigued by. Each player has an identical deck of 40 cards and one player will shuffle and draw 6 cards. Everyone else will take those same 6 cards from their decks and that's their hand for the round. Each day, players will play one of the cards from their hands and they'll be played in order of the number. In the result of a tie, a new reputation track has been added. The higher reputation goes first. Then the cards will activate, if they have a daytime event that is. Then dusk happens and the players will select a treasure from the day in order of reputation and activate any effects they may have. Then nighttime effects happen and the cards are placed in their respective ships. This repeats for the entire voyage and when the voyage ends, players will tally up all of their doubloons based on the treasures they received. The different treasures have different effects and values. Then the board will reset and all of the characters in your ship will be discarded. Another 6 cards will be drawn and the leftover cards from the first voyage remain in your hand for extra variety. The player with the most doubloons at the end will be the winner.
The Good: This is simply put a really mechanically sound game. I love that everyone starts out equal but as the game progresses, the cards leftover will vary and that can throw in some unpredictability to the rounds. It provides an additional level of strategy and allows observant players to know what people didn't play. I'm not one of them but it essentially keeps the whole game as public information. The use of the reputation track is a great way to break ties and getting first dibs at loot gives an added layer to fight over. I'm also a sucker for chunky tokens and the loot tokens nail this aspect.
The Okay: The fact that there was an added board for two players was a great touch and it gave some more take that since it allows players to remove loot from the board. This is great but it's still a game that is meant to be played with more people. It's a lot easier to keep track of the other player but it feels like it's missing something at the end of the day. I'd still absolutely play this at 2 but this is built for more.
The Not So Good: Aesthetically, this game is beautiful and I love the art style but thematically, I didn't really care. Bipedal animal sky pirates just doesn't feel as cool as people sea pirates. Luckily, the game has enough legs for me to overlook the theme. I just pretend their sea pirates.
Final Thoughts: Having never played the original, it's hard to compare the two games but Winds of Galecrest is an excellent way to introduce players to this game. Typically I struggle with teaching games from Stonemaier, which isn't a knock on them by any means, but this felt like such a smooth game to teach and play with a group that isn't as seasoned to the hobby. It's deep enough to keep avid players engaged but simple enough to introduce to new players. Overall, I really enjoyed this game a lot. More than I thought I would, even.
A review copy was provided for content creation purposes.