PIRATES OF THE KITCHEN TABLE
In the original Pirates of the Caribbean movie, there’s a scene where newbie pirate Will Turner tries to help Jack Sparrow intimidate a crew of Royal Navy sailors and steal their ship. Jack Sparrow lets the sailors know their ship is being stolen, and Will helpfully levels a sword to incentivise compliance. “Aye! Avast!” he shouts, and then the navy men all laugh at him.
Luckily, in Skull King, everyone playing has to loudly pretend to be a pirate together, and no-one reps the Navy. Play it without an audience, I suppose, if you get easily embarrassed: the “yo-ho-ho” chant involved in bidding is not optional. For maximum enjoyment, it is advised to abandon all inhibitions, and play the whole game in-character as your personal favourite pirate.
Looks like a bid of 1 to me…
SEIZING THE PRIZE
This trick-taker commits strongly to the pirate theme. Whist, Bridge, or even Wizard, this is not, though there are four suits, high card wins and scoring is based on accurately bidding the number of tricks you expect to take. Winner leads, follow suit, all that familiar stuff.
The suits themselves are appropriately buccaneering, with green Parrots, gold Treasures, purple Maps and black Flags (the trump suit). Then there is a set of additional, even higher trump cards - Pirates (five, in red, each with their own name and art), Mermaids (two, in blue), and the Skull King (black, of course). There are also blue “Escape” cards, which always lose the trick. The unique Tigress card is both Pirate and Escape, and can be played as either one (making it, for my money, the single best card in the game). These extras, along with the “optional” Kraken and White Whale cards (you should play with these cards), are where the high-risk swashbuckling feel of the game truly lives. Their unique rules (especially the two sea monsters) mean that no card can be 100% relied upon to win (or even to lose) a trick, and thus the bidding is always risky.
Release… The Kraken!
The Pirates beat everything except the Skull King, the Skull King beats everything except a Mermaid, and the Mermaids beat everything except a Pirate. You get bonus points if you exploit this rock-paper-scissors dynamic in a trick. The Kraken and White Whale are even more chaotic — neither will win a trick, but they ruin other players’ plans beautifully. The Kraken simply “eats” a whole trick, so that it doesn’t count for anyone. The White Whale “scares” the trick, so the special trumps don’t count, and the highest number pip card played (of any suit) wins.
REALLY BAD EGGS
It’s not all treasure and revelry here. My own copy has pretty good print quality, but I’ve seen other printings with very faded colours. Also, there is no variation in the pip card art, and no face cards for the suits either. Granted, the “face” cards are the Pirates and friends, but still. The art is evocative enough, but it could be much more so.
Pictured: the entire Black Flag suit, plus the awesome Skull King card
It’s not hard to play if you’ve played a trick-taker or two before, but some of the specific interactions between the unique cards can require looking up rules, such as in what happens when two Pirates are played together (the first one wins) or when the Kraken and White Whale are played in the same trick (the first one played “loses” to the other; only the effect of the second one played applies).
Also, this is a party game to its core, and will thwart your careful plans. Don’t expect to be able to accurately predict how many tricks you’ll take each time, even if you’re a fiend at Bridge!
DRINK UP ME HEARTIES, YO HO!
This game is quick, scales well to most group sizes, and doesn’t ask much of the players. It has a strong theme, enough strategy to be compelling to think about and enough chaos (play the Kraken and White Whale cards!) to throw off the best-laid plans of strategic players who might otherwise dominate a game. It works excellently for a family gathering, and particularly with people who aren’t deep into board games — most will understand its simple pitch of “Whist, but there are some special cards. And you have to act like a pirate.”
Rum optional, but recommended.
