Renegade Game Studios Dead Men Tell No Tales Strategy Boxed Board Game Ages 12 & Up for 2-5 Players 60-75 minutes playing time

Awesome co-op with magnificent replay value. The quality of the game is excellent; the pieces are a good thickness and visually beautiful. They've held up well over the 2 or 3 years we've had it.It's mostly easy to learn, but very complex.The basics are: you and a crew are trying to explore the burning pirate ship, Skellit's Revenge. You need to fight guards and loot x amount of treasures, then safely make it off the ship with the treasures and all the crew to win. Along the way you have to fight the rising fire levels in the rooms, the seemingly endless supply of deckhands crawling the ship, and the skeleton crew.This sounds simple, but it's not.Each turn you flip a tile to "discover" a room, and place a fire die on the tile (until the stack runs out, then you keep playing as normal). Then you draw either a trapdoor, guard/treasure, or skeleton crew/item disc to place on the tile You have 5 actions and these can be used in any combination or duplication to walk or run, fight fires, boost strength, eliminate deckhands, loot, or rest. You get fatigued based on each movement plus the difference between the fire level of the room you move into from your previous room (if it's a higher fire level).The rules are different if you're looting.Guards and skeleton crew attack you as soon as you enter the room, so they're a "free" action. When these are defeated they flip over and you can use an action to pick up the treasure chest or item.IF YOU WANT TO WIN, you have to pay an equal amount of attention to fighting fires and eliminating deckhands, because once all the tiles are laid out, the Skellit's Revenge card played at the end of each player's turn will increase the fire levels and the amount of deckhands by a crazy amount. The deckhands spread out into rooms that have fewer amounts of deckhands in them, or are added to each tile with a trapdoor (so when all the tiles are laid you'll have up to 7 deckhands (maybe more if you don't strategize) added to the board each time a player completes their turn. This can get out of control quickly and once you run out of deckhands to place, you lose. If the amount of treasures you need to loot is made unavailable, you lose. If the fire dice reach 6 or the level of the powder barrel in some rooms and too many powder barrels or rooms explode, you lose. If your way off the ship is blocked off, you lose. If everyone dies and no more replacement characters are available to continue the game, you lose.It's very easy to lose.After proclaiming all the above, this is probably the most difficult-to-win board game I've ever played. After maybe eight or nine arduous play-throughs with various friends, we have yet to win this game without accidentally cheating (one win out of nine, and we were unintentionally cheating pretty badly for it to happen).That being said, this is still my favorite co-op board game, and probably still overall all-time favorite board game.Dead Men Tell No Tales is a blast when you strategize with everyone and work together to help cover areas and other players. Even when you lose you still enjoy the time spent.I would absolutely recommend this game to board and strategy game enthusiasts. I would love to get the Kraken expansion, but I can't until we win this game at least once!

I played this a handful of times now. It is so much fun. The rules are clear and simple, setup is quick once you've played it once and the players turns are fast with a single d6 for combat. This game is also easy to solo if you don't have a group to play with.Many have said this game is hard. I haven't necessarily had that same experience on the normal difficulty with 2-3 players, If you choose to add in the Captain as an enemy for the harder mode this can be much more difficult and the highest difficulty which requires getting all the treasure and killing all skeleton crew is very hard, I have not been able to do this as of yet, but I'm having a lot of fun trying to get there. Which says a lot because other co-op games can be down right frustrating.So if you're worried about the difficulty, don't be; the game has a few difficulties which basically just change the requirements for winning like getting more treasure off the ship and the game is worth playing through many times so you can ramp it up as you get more familiar with how to play it. It's definitely not as difficult as Zombicide: Black Plague which I bought at the same time. I see this game getting played more often than that one in my future.The combat I mentioned is single d6 combat. You roll your die, add your strength basically and compare to the skeleton crew you're fighting. Other games with dice rolling can really destroy you in one bad roll. This game gives you better odds I feel with how you can boost your attack with action points and earned weapons. You can see what the enemy is strength-wise before going into fight and can tell when ones you actually need to defeat to get your treasure so it's not a total shot in the dark and there's fair strategy. So combat in this game gets a big thumbs up for not being overly cheap randomness.Dying in the game doesn't necessarily render a game over, depending how many players you have you get more chances. Once you die you can pick another character card and jump back in the game if there are any characters left (7 total).I'm not going to go over all the rules, you can find some good videos online of game-play on this, which is what ultimately sold me (along with the theme and artwork). I was not a kickstarter backer, never even heard of the game until the week I bought it. I was looking for a good co-op that doesn't take a lifetime to setup and play, this game delivers!The quality of pieces is about what I expected, the artwork is great on both the cards and the board tiles. The only thing that could make this game any better would be detailed miniatures, maybe plastic dials instead of cardboard, but for the $36 I was paying I don't expect all that.Bottom line is: If you like cooperative games and pirates (heck even if you don't like pirates), this is one to make sure you buy. It's worth the money and you'll get a lot of replay-value out of it. If you hate co-ops this isn't for you.

Very cool game, very interesting mechanics, the rules are okay and I do like the idea of a pirate dungeon crawl game. I gave it 4 stars because it's not a fast game with 2 people, need more people to play and I did watch you tube videos on the game itself to help both player and refs and learn the game and I didn't like the wooden pieces that represents your character, plus I wish their is a separate holders for tiles and cards but overall it was fun to play..

Being my 3rd tabletop board game purchase, the rules could have been done a little better. I played through a bunch of times solo to get the gameplay figured out by playing 2 pirates before bringing in other players. It's not real hard but does take some planning and thinking. This game is a nice change from playing Pandemic. I would total reccomend this game. My wife who is not a tabletop gamer REALLY liked this game. We have played with my 6 year old who really enjoyed it. We did have to help him with the gameplay. We found it to be a great way to get him to practice math as well. Game is well made( although the starting board has started to warp a bit. Not a big deal) when and if you get this game be prepared to do a bit of searching online and on YouTube to get a better feel for the gameplay and rules. Truly not that hard to figure out.