Pirate’s Cove - Tips & Strategies

In contrast to my “Cold Calulation For The Win” strategy, if you want to feel the thrill of battle, you can go pirate hunting. This is a strategy to use if you really enjoy improving your ship and getting into fights.

If you are going to use up lots of resources on making an awesome ship, then you better make it count. Instead of trying to avoid battles, MAKE SURE you get into them. Don’t bother with the legendary pirates too much. They’ll bust up the best of ships. Instead, try to anticipate where you’re opponent’s are going and show up to greet them. Every time you blow them out of the water, you are getting bonus points for the fight and denying them access to treasure.

Do this enough and you might find your opponents avoiding the best treasure spots out of shear fear of fighting you. Just remember that battle in this game is still pretty random. To stand a chance, you’ll need a healthy dose of luck and some useful tavern cards to bend the fates to your whim.

With fate on your side and a guns at the ready you can win the way pirate games are meant to be won: by blowing the competition out of the water.

Here are some strategies I’ve employed over about a dozen times playing Pirate’s Cove:

– Spend some time thinking about where each player will go and try to avoid these spots. (Sadly) Avoiding combat is the key to winning this game.
– Sails are probably the most important attribute as half the time you get an extra roll on the player you’re fighting.
– Take time to buy cards, don’t only upgrade your ship. The cards can actually be very powerful.
– Make sure to offload your gold on the 2nd to last month as the pirate goes there at the end and there’s no reason to fight him unless you’re extremely powerful.

My group has found moving the pirate just 1 island each turn is a bit too slow, but we also thought that randomly rolling a dice each turn to see where the pirate went was also a bit too.. random.

Our compromise is to roll a dice at the beginning of each turn:

– 1/2: Pirate moves 1 island
– 3/4: Pirate moves 2 islands
– 5/6: Pirate moves 3 islands

This lets people still pick safe islands but gives others looking for the higher chance of picking an isolated island or just better loot might have to face the pirate.

If you’re feeling especially chaotic one day and “the winds, they be a changing”, try playing Pirate’s Cove using random appearance for the Legendary Pirates. After every one has revealed their destination islands roll a die to determine which of the six islands the Legendary Pirate visits – the number on the die corresponding to the island’s number. Decide at the start of the game if your group wishes to have the Legendary Pirate automatically go to Treasure Island on turn 12 (my personal preference) or have it random as well.

My girlfriend and I don’t discard any treasure cards that haven’t been taken at the end of each round and this extends the game a bit. Though it usually ends up with the player who has the unlimited chests parrot running around with 30 or so chests but that makes it all the more exciting when you do sink them because they’ve been too greedy to unload.

It is also a good idea to limit the amount of tavern cards each player may have else battles revolve around who can roll more 6’s owing to smokescreen.

Your ship is bursting at the seams with treasure, ready to deposit at Treasure Island. But no! The blue player fires off a Consort! Dont forget, if you are anchored at Treasure Island, it is your option to bury treasure. If you bury none, the Consort player gets nothing!

You essentially waste a turn this way, but if you have a lot of treasure to bury, this is very effective indeed.

Use the ships/models from Pirates of the Spanish Main instead of the included plastic ships. It doesn’t change the game any, but it adds to the theme.