Sea of Thieves Voyage of Legends Review

Overview

Sea of Thieves is one of my favorite video games, and the board game version is an impressively close adaptation to its digital sibling. Fans of the video game will find many mechanisms familiar, at least in spirit.

That’s a pretty big point in my favor because when it comes to a board game adaptation of a video game, I’m expecting some level of respect for the source material. In Voyage of Legends case, it tries really hard and almost succeeds.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

The problem is, there is a fatal flaw in its design that greatly impairs its ability to emulate the video game. However, it’s important to note that this flaw also impacts its ability to be an enjoyable board game, and that would be true even if it wasn’t an adaptation of Sea of Thieves.

The flaw in question is just how difficult it is to meaningfully sink another player’s ship before they offload all their treasure. It’s mathematically unlikely to happen, except in the rarest of circumstances. Once that flaw is exposed, it impacts the entire decision space of the game. Attacking other players almost always wastes your own actions and resources for no gain. As a result many of the game’s fortune cards also become useless.

Much like the video game, the threat of other pirates is core to experience. Once that threat is gone, it becomes a chore of dull checklists.

Gideon’s Bias	Sea of Thieves Voyage of Legends Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Steamforged Games LTD
Number of Plays: 8+	Designers: Mat Hart, James M. Hewitt, Steve Margetson, Sherwin Matthews, Sophie Williams
Player Counts Played: 2 & 4	Player Count: 2-4
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: 4X Strategy
Fan of Weight: Yes	Weight: Medium
Gaming Groups Thoughts: Disliked It	Price: $59.99

Presentation

Most of the artwork in Voyage of Legends is pulled from the video game and has a consistent feel throughout. You get several modular boards to form the play space, and they can be distributed in any fashion and are double-sided, giving you a bit of variety in your game setup.

The game has several varieties of cards between special crew members, voyages, events, and fortune cards. As well as a bunch of different tokens. Visually, Voyage of Legends is pretty clean and easy to understand, with simple iconography and plenty of clarity when it comes to its text.

You get a handful of dice and lots of nifty standees to represent the ships and sea monsters of the game. The included insert makes putting away Voyage of Legends a simple endeavor, and the rulebook is well-written and clear.

The game isn’t that complicated, but there is an initial learning curve as you wrap your head around the variety of actions and how they work. One particular annoyance I do have is that there are two token bags, which is fine. But the game will often prompt you to pull specific tokens out of the bags, which requires you to dig through and find those specific tokens.

Voyage of Legends comes with an ample amount of content and components for the price. The fact that the game opted for standees as opposed to miniatures definitely helped keep the price reasonable and accessible. That’s something that I appreciate.

What I Like About Sea of Thieves

That Pirate Spirit

Sea of Thieves emulates the look, feel, and spirit of the video game quite well. The goal is to sail around and loot treasure to sell while gaining reputation. The game ends when a player reaches 25 reputation, and then additional factors add to that score to determine a winner.

Just like the video game, you sail around plundering loot, battling skeleton ships, raiding forts, and getting attacked by sea monsters. You complete quests called voyages and If your ships sink they respawn, as does your crew. Honestly, there are only a couple of departures from the video game. The fact that you control two ships, you pay to upgrade them, and the ability to hire special crew members are the biggest differences.

I really enjoy just how much Voyage of Legends feels like I’m playing the video game. If your ship takes damage, the water level rises. Your crew uses boards to repair the damage and they have to bail out the water. The Fortune cards also give you a bunch of abilities to perform that all feel very accurate to the game.

You can, for example, use a gunpowder barrel to do a bunch of damage, but risk hurting your own ship. You can send a boarding party to steal some treasure from another ship. Fortune cards grant you access to special cannon balls with various effects. If a ship sinks or an enemy is destroyed, the loot floats amid the sea of its space and you have to take additional actions to actually pick them up, leaving time for another person to come plundering. The event cards function almost like the video game’s emergent world, spawning krakens, forts, and skeletal ships, providing new threats, and giving players new things to do.

I love all of that, not just the accuracy with which these mechanisms portray their inspiration from the video game, but how they feel in the board game itself. Sea of Thieves comes very close to being both, a great adaptation of a popular video game, and a great board game in its own right. Were it not for the fatal flaw in its hull, it would have succeeded.

The Scurvy Knave & Reputation Track

Sea of Thieves tackles the concept of runaway leaders and catch-up mechanics in an interesting way that I really enjoy. At the end of every round, everyone is dealt a Fortune card, these cards have a variety of useful abilities. If someone has pulled way ahead of the rest of the players on the reputation track, the losing players are dealt extra fortune cards for every fortune space between them and the leader.

Furthermore, the player in last is known as the Scurvy Knave, and the event cards always give them something they can do. This can be screwing over someone else, or simply giving themselves a slight boost. Sea of Thieves is a pretty long game, so these balancing acts are a welcome way to keep sessions from becoming blowouts too early. 

They aren’t simply handicaps either, you have to make tactical decisions around them. Pulling really far ahead is a conscious decision you make and you have to weigh the potential cons of giving the other players extra options. At the same time, strategically footing yourself as the Scurvy Knave in a close game has tactical value.

Both mechanisms are a nifty way to tackle potential problems without punishing a skilled player for being good at the game.

What I Dislike About Sea of Thieves

That Fatal Flaw

The core of the Sea of Thieves video game is the ever-present danger of other pirates. Or at least it was before Rare ripped the heart and soul of the game out by implementing safer seas, buuuut I digress.

The point is, that many of the activities in the video game would have been dull on their own, but they were part of a greater whole. They served as a pathway to get treasure, and treasure is what facilitated player interaction. You had to weigh the risks of where you went, keep an eye out for ships on the horizon, and bringing in a hefty haul of loot was full of tension, because you could be attacked at any time.

All of this is also true of Voyage of Legends. It seeks to capture that same tension and uses various activities that give you treasure to facilitate those pathways of player interaction. The problem is, that it mathematically falls apart.

I’ll be as brief as I can as to how this works and why it breaks. You have two ships, and three action tokens. Using an action token allows your ship’s crew to perform one task each, and the ship performs a special action. A ship can’t have more than two action tokens on it per turn. Sloops have two crew members, Brigs have three and Galleons have four.

One task a crew member can perform is to sail one hex. Pretty straightforward. This means a Sloop that uses an action token can sail two hexes. But after a crew completes their tasks, you get a special action. These can be plundering, opening fire, and trading, but you can also Full Sail, which allows you to roll dice and sail extra hexes with each success.

When rolling dice, 3 4, and 5 are successes, and 6 counts as 2 successes.

Ships have a water level, if the water token rises to the top, the ship sinks. At the end of a player’s turn, the water level rises by one for each damage token they have. It’s very important to note, that this happens at the END of THEIR turn. So, if for example, I open fire on your ship and deal four damage to it. The water does not rise until the end of your turn. This means if I want your treasure, you won’t sink until the end of your turn, and then I have to sail over and start plundering it.

Here’s where it breaks. You can sell your loot to the outpost as a special action. The outpost is in the middle of the map. The farthest you can be from the outpost is 6 hexes at most. Let’s assume a sloop has treasure and is damaged at the farthest it can be from the outpost. Remember, water does not rise from damage until the end of that Sloop’s turn.

The Sloop can move four hexes closer just through its crew tasks by using two action tokens. It will have two special actions, one of which will need to be full sail to reach the outpost. This is technically a gamble, it needs two successes, but the mathematics of 3, 4, and 5 being a success with 6 being a double puts the odds in the Sloop’s favor. If it makes it, its second special action will be to trade and sell all of its loot.

After that, sinking doesn’t matter. The ship will respawn. You do lose reputation IF you happen to have an unfinished voyage, but it’s pretty circumstantial. The ease with which the sloop can make it to the outpost isn’t factoring in any abilities or cards the player might have. But here’s the important bit.

That entire scenario assumes that the ship is a sloop, is the farthest away from the outpost it can be, and has no way to repair any damage without getting to the outpost.

If the Sloop is only four hexes away, it can make it to the outpost and sell its loot without any dice rolls. If the ship is a Brig or Galleon, either one can make it to the outpost from the edge of the map, without rolling any dice, and sell their loot.

This effectively means that sinking a player and taking their loot is an extreme rarity, not the common threat that is supposed to pervade the entire game. It’s such a rarity in fact, that most people won’t even bother to try, as they are far more likely to waste their actions and resources for nothing.

It makes a great deal of combat-oriented fortune cards feel useless in all but a handful of rare situations. It turns Voyage of Legends into a very dull as dishwater multiplayer solitaire game, as the other activities are much less interesting when there is no threat to you.

The Playtime

Voyage of Legends is a long game. Some of the sessions I played lasted over 4 hours. The thing is, I love long games IF I’m engaged with what is happening. Mostly thanks to the flaw I mentioned, I wasn’t engaged at all.

Without the threat that combat brings, players are really just sailing from island to island, plundering some loot and fulfilling a voyage or two as they do it. It isn’t interesting on its own, nor do I really care what the other players are doing during my downtime. Each player has a lot of actions to take each turn, and then there are a couple of phases where you need to take care of an event and move enemies around, so downtime is high.

Unengaging downtime in a four-hour session is mind-numbing. Sea of Thieves is one of the few games where my group and I straight-up called it quits without finishing the session at one point. We all came to a similar conclusion. The game was really fun at first, but once the mathematics of the combat became apparent, the fun died instantly. Voyage of Legends is not made to be a multiplayer solitaire game and its gameplay can’t hold it up as one, especially not for four or more hours.

Verdict

Sea of Thieves Voyage of Legends is almost a great game and a faithful adaptation of the video game. But some mathematical flaws in its combat sink that ship the moment it leaves port.

Some house rule tweaks could help, but I have to be brutally honest. The flaw is bad enough and apparent enough that shipping with it feels somewhat inexcusable. As a reviewer, I’m also loathe to recommend a game that you have to fix right out of the box.