Review – Six-Sided Seas

Six-Sided Seas is a 2-player game where you will roll dice to determine what you can do each round, pushing your luck to see if you can get one more action and hoping it doesn’t make you bust, or go Overboard. As long as your dice total isn’t higher than your Coin limit, you’re fine. In fact if you roll exactly your Coin limit you get a Jackpot effect, where you can either raise your Coin limit by 1 or Roll an additional die that doesn’t count against your total. After all the rolling is the Order Phase, where you assign your dice and try to gain victory by one of the 3 win conditions: Plunder, Exploration, or Sink Your Rivals (you can have 4 players with 2 copies of the game). So is it a pirate-y fun time, or should you have stayed in port? Read on for the review!

Review

Game components for Six-Sided Seas consist of the Game Mat, 32 D6’s, and 2 glass beads to track your Coins. Setup is as easy as picking a color, putting 2 D6’s on their maximum value for your Hull Points (HP), and determining the starting player. Player 1 in a 2-player game gets 12 for their Coin Limit, and Player 2 gets 13. The first player will then do a Roll Phase, then an Order Phase where they assign all the dice. In the Roll Phase players can roll as many dice as they dare, as long as they haven’t gone over their Coin limit. Going over means you went Overboard, and all you can do is place up to 3 dice with different values in your Evade spaces, then your turn is over. If you hit your Coin limit exactly, then you hit the Jackpot, and you can either Gain 1 Coin to your limit, or Roll 1 additional die that doesn’t count towards your total. 

Order Phase lets you assign dice to the various spaces on your board, which will let you fire cannons, Send Grog, Send Explorers, Double Time, Plunder, and Ram your opponent. There’s also a couple special actions, Hold and Evade. Hold lets you store a die, and evade lets you place up to 3 different dice there to prevent the loss of HP when your opponent attacks (note: Ram cannot be Evaded). See the photo gallery for a specific breakdown of all the things you can do on your ship. 

When you Send Explorers, you have to spend 3 consecutive dice and then you can claim an island matching any of those numbers. Each of the 6 islands has powerful abilities attached to them like being able to change or modify your dice or dealing double damage when you roll 4 or 6. Also, if you control 4 or more islands at the start of your turn, you win the game via Exploration. You can also win by reducing your opponent’s HP to 0 (Sink Your Rivals), or by Plunder AKA getting more than the 21 Coin limit. Having these different possible paths to victory keeps the game fresh while also letting players adapt their plans on the fly. Sure, it’d be nice to quietly gain coins and pull off a pacifist victory, but if the dice don’t give you 3 equal numbers but you get a lot of 6’s, guess you’ll have to start firing the cannons, eh? 

On the back page there are rules for playing with 3 or 4 players if you obtain a 2nd copy of the game, which is basically you use only 1 set of islands and anyone going to 0 HP gets to be a Ghost Ship, but can only Fire Cannons or use Double Time or Send Grog. You can also come back into the game in a weakened state if you take out the last living Captain. 

Six-Sided Seas is the perfect amount of quick setup and easy to learn gameplay that I love to have in a 2-player game. After playing a bit the iconography makes total sense, and I only needed to go back to the rulebook for clarity on a couple of the Island abilities. For instance, Noodles, Bump Isle, and Lucky Reef can actually be used during the Order phase without going Overboard, which makes them even more powerful choices. If you’re looking for a fun, easy-to-learn press-your-luck game with an odd shaped box but cool playmat, look no further me hearties. 

A review copy was provided by the publisher.