Sea King Adventures Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Sea King Adventures, a muchkin style take that card game, now available on Game Crafter.

Goblin pirate ships with unicorn figureheads. Epic seaborn showdowns between Ninjas and mercenaries. Sea monsters, big and small. All of this and more are jam packed into the Sea King Adventure Card Game by Party Pug Games.

Is it possible for this riot of styles and themes to all work together harmoniously, creating an interesting and exciting game system? Or is it just too much all at once, jumbling together into a confusing meld?

Every player is assigned a captain card, all with their own abilities. The different draw decks—including fortunes, supplies, and adventures—are laid out on deck marker boards in the center of the playfield. Everyone gets a player board and markers to track their combat rating, HP, and trophies. The game ends when one player achieves a set number of trophies.

On their turn, players draw supply cards that can give them boosted abilities, including ship parts. If you collect ship parts that match, like the Jade Dragon ship theme, the bonuses stack, giving you the best opportunity to increase your defense score. Once you’ve selected which cards to play into your tableau, you draw an adventure card with a monster to battle. Using the defense value you’ve accumulated through your ship and bonus cards, as well as curse or boon cards that may play in your favor, you try to best the monster’s combat rating. If you succeed, you collect a reward, including extra draw cards and trophy points. If you lose, your HP goes down.

When I opened up the game and started looking at the cards, one of the first things I did was flip to the back of the Rulebook to see the artists credited. I didn’t see any clear mention of AI, so I contacted the publisher. Niles at Party Pug Games was helpful and open about the fact that they did use Midjourney (the same AI generation tool used by Stronghold Games for the More Terraforming Mars expansion) as part of the art