Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy Review

boardgamequest.com:

At Gen Con this year, veteran family game publisher HABA Games released its newest offering Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy. While the game comes in the standard Haba box, what’s instead is anything but.

This is the first legacy game offering from HABA games and it’s aimed squarely at families. That’s right, you’ll be opening boxes, placing stickers, and adding rules over the course of the campaign. Are your kids ready for their first legacy experience?

The basics of Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy is pretty simple. This cooperative game tasks players with moving wooden sailors around a ship to their matching-color oars. On a player’s turn, they may move a sailor one space along an unblocked, connected path. They then pass the Capt’n Pepe ball to the next player who takes their turn.

This is all played in real-time as a sand timer is running in the center of the ship. Once the timer runs out, players count how many sailors are standing next to the oar that matches the animal’s color and score a point for each. Then the oars are reset and players try again. After three rounds, players will total up their points (max of 15) and score rewards based on how well they did. Rewards are in the form of stickers to place on their nautical map, and as you earn more points you will be allowed to place more stickers.

The core gameplay loop of Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy is super simple. Move guys around the ship and get them where they need to be. The challenge comes not only from the real-time aspect, but in figuring out how to move people where they need to go. Since you can’t move someone through another person, you’ll need to move people out of the way to get them through.

As the campaign progresses, this becomes a bit more difficult as the