A Moderately Jolly Roger

If there's a weakness to most cooperative board games, it's the way that often, not all players are always able to contribute. "Leaders" can emerge and dominate the experience, shutting out other players from participating fully in the experience. (And I say this as someone who has probably been that overbearing leader more than I should.) One way that some cooperative games try to address this is by making the game play in real time. I recently got to play such a game: A Tale of Pirates.

Players are all trying to crew a pirate ship and navigate it through obstacles. There are different job spaces around the ship: cannons to be loaded and fired, a wheel to steer, a crow's nest from which to observe, and so forth. Each player's piece is a short sand timer. You flip it as you place it into the space with the action you want to take. When the timer runs out, you do the action, then must move your timer to a new space. Players must work together at spotting obstacles, attacking and boarding enemy ships to steal their plunder, and sailing the ship to safety and glory all within a limited amount of time.

An app is the "game master," serving up increasingly more difficult scenarios for you to survive in increasingly tighter time frames. Coordination is key. The sand timers make the order things happen in matter, while the requirement to move to a new action each time means that everybody has the chance to do something important almost every round.

In a purely cosmetic (but also quite fun) touch, the game is played on a 3D pirate ship assembled of thick cardboard parts. You actually place your timer up in the crow's nest, actually spin the ship as it turns, actually raise the sails as you speed up, and so forth. It adds still more tactile thrills to the already potent immediacy of the timers. And it creates a hectic sort of fun.

That said, boil away the bells and whistles, and the game reminded me a lot of FUSE. That's a cooperative game where players frenetically roll dice to disarm bombs aboard their spaceship. Though the components there are less extravagant, the game comes together for me in a far more satisfying way. A Tale of Pirates makes a striking first impression, but the actual experience of playing it just doesn't feel as potent, and it doesn't feel to me like it would have the same long life as FUSE.

If the pirate theme sounds fun to you, A Tale of Pirates isn't bad. I'd grade it a B-. You could do worse in a cooperative game. But with other games around (and FUSE in particular), you could also do better.