Seas of Havoc Review

Deck building and worker placement on the high seas.

Seas of Havoc combines two of my personal favorite mechanics, deck building and worker placement, but does it do it well? Each player selects a ship and a captain and collects their starting cards and workers. The game plays in 2 phases, the island and sea phases. During the island phase, players will take turns placing their 3 workers for resources, buying new cards, and collecting flags. Players purchase a card by claiming it with their worker and then spending the necessary resources for it. It goes straight into their hand instead of a discard or deck so they can be used immediately. Next is the sea phase. Here, players take turns playing cards from their hands to maneuver their ships and attack other players ships. The orientation of your ship is key here because they can only fire from the sides you need to make sure you can actually hit them. You also need to have cannon balls from the island phase leftover to shoot them. If you are hit, you must add a damage card to your discard pile. The attacker will also score points for causing damage. This continues until everyone has passed and then cleanup and the next round begins. The game will end when all of the damage cards have been used. Players will score points for the cards they've purchased and any upgrades they may have purchased and whoever has the most wins.

The Good: As a friend of mine told me, this is a great beer and pretzels game. The phases move quickly and the rules are pretty minimal. There is a ton of variability in the game with the various ships and captain combinations that you can use. The usage of the flags is a unique concept. Any card you play in the sea phase that matches a flag in your possession will allow you to do bonus actions. These are never permanent as other players can take them from you by going to its space in the island phase.

The Okay: At times, you could feel completely stuck without damaging yourself to move around or waiting for a card to come up to pivot. The overall concept of alignment is fantastic but with randomized islands/spaces for everything means you could get yourself into some trouble if you aren't careful. While rare, this did happen a couple of times when I played.

The Not So Good: Some of the concessions that needed to be made to make the game function well at two players I didn't love. There are some spaces on the board that are entirely blocked unless you have 3 or more players and players need to control 2 ships each to help fill out the map. I would have liked to see the map smaller if this was the case. This is an issue with the deluxe version but the player boards don't all actually fit in the insert.

Final Thoughts: So how did Seas of Havoc play out? I think that the deck building for the game is wonderful. There's a fair variety of cards and you can feel the deck becoming stronger as the game progresses. The worker placement aspect was okay. The spots are pretty simplistic and at lower counts inaccessible but the phase itself moves along quickly so you can get to the fun part where you shoot your friends with cannons. This game will stick around in my collection as a great gateway into both mechanics and it's just a lot of fun when it's all said and done.

Thanks to Tabletop Tycoon and Rock Manor for providing a review copy.