Walk the Plank!

You know, market is bad, companies all over doing headcount reduction, firing people left and right.

Predictably instead of firing that lazy manager who gets a fat pay cheque every month doing nothing of value whatsoever, it's the twenty employees actually doing the job who get the shaft, since it takes the combined salary of twenty working employees to make up that manager's fat pay cheque.

It's the same for pirates, and that's the background story for the game Walk the Plank!

 

Okay, I just made that up, the game background story isn't exactly that. =P

Anyway it's close enough: captain pirate only wants two pirates left from his pool of lazy and slow-witted crew, the rest of the pirates in that worst of the worst group are sent off the plank as Kraken food.

Walk the Plank! is a fun and easy to learn game for three to five players. Each player starts with three pirates and the aim is to be the one with at least a pirate alive by the end of the game.

two pirates in Kraken's belly

Game ends when there are only two pirates left, meaning it can either be a single player with two pirates or one each from two players.

What do we do to keep our pirates alive? Well, we push others off the plank, of course! =P

And we do that by strategically playing our cards. The cards represent predetermined actions that we have to follow through in sequence even if they are actually detrimental to our pirates.

That's actually the fun and hilarious part, seeing your pirate suicidally charged off the plank, hehehe. Okay, maybe it's only funny if you have a wicked sense of humour like I do.

a good time to retract the plank and send the two pirates to Kraken

There are more actions than simply shoving each other, there are pulling, dragging back, randomly running around, retract or extend the plank and more, giving a good mix of strategy. Some cards cannot be played twice in a roll and we can only ask our pirate to charge as the second or third action.

I guess the only downside is that this is an elimination game, if you got ganged up on (like I did), you would be out of the game in the first few rounds and you would have to wait for that game to end before you could play again.

That said, it's a relatively quick game so the wait shouldn't be too long. The listed play time of 20 minutes is pretty accurate. For our virgin gaming session yesterday, the four of us managed to get five games in about 1.5 hours.

Fun, quick and easy game, all you need is a group of geeky fun-loving, easygoing friends. Sense of humour is a plus, wicked sense of humour an icing on the cake. =P

Mayday Games should feel free to send me more of their games for review and advertisement. =)