We featured the Big Box edition of Port Royal (Pegasus Spiele) around 18 months ago on Board's Eye View. It brought together the core game with its various expansions and promos. But Port Royal has returned. This version replaces the push-your-luck card draws with push-your-luck rolls of two custom six-sided dice, one of which shows a colour of ship or wheel and the other the position on a grid on which it has to be placed. The potential benefits you get from the dice increase with the number of rolls but if you roll a combination that cannot be placed out on the grid, you are bust. As in the original card game, other players get to choose from the benefits not taken by the dice roller.
With Port Royal: The Dice Game, Alexander Pfister has reinvented Port Royal as a roll & write game. The game comes with two pads of double-sided map sheets, offering four different maps on which to play, with incremental difficulty. Having chosen the map to use in the game, the 2-5 players mark off sea routes and islands on their copy according to actions they selected from the dice rolls, ultimately scoring points, levelling up and earning bonus actions, including the ability to disregard a dice roll. Points can be lost when you incur skull symbols. Some bonuses on the maps are treasures that are only available to the first player to unlock them, so there's a race element too to the game.
Unlike most other roll & write games, scoring is immediate: there's a separate score track on which players advance their tokens. This encourages players to be more daring in their push-your-luck dice rolling because, as an alternative to being the first to 20 points, it offers the possibility of nabbing a sudden death immediate win for placing out all the ships and wheels on the grid. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found this injected more excitement into the game as it meant a player that was behind on the score track still had a chance to steal victory by pushing their luck to the limit.
Port Royal: The Dice Game plays quickly and, like the original game, it keeps everyone involved throughout because, at least with two or three players, you can expect to be able to take an action on each other's turns. There's even a small consolation if you go bust. The maps add the feel of exploration and they present you with an optimisation puzzle as you weigh up the best way to use your movement and/or levelling up actions.
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