Dead Men Tell No Tales Strategy Board Game for Ages 12 and Up 2-5 Players

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1. Overview and How to Play Dead Men Tell No Tales Board Game Verified Buyer – 15 July 2024

   Awesome co-op with magnificent replay value. The quality of the game is excellent; the pieces are a good thickness and visually beautiful. They’ve held up well over the 2 or 3 years we’ve had it. It’s mostly easy to learn, but very complex. The basics are: you and a crew are trying to explore the burning pirate ship, Skellit’s Revenge. You need to fight guards and loot x amount of treasures, then safely make it off the ship with the treasures and all the crew to win. Along the way you have to fight the rising fire levels in the rooms, the seemingly endless supply of deckhands crawling the ship, and the skeleton crew. This sounds simple, but it’s not. Each turn you flip a tile to “discover” a room, and place a fire die on the tile (until the stack runs out, then you keep playing as normal). Then you draw either a trapdoor, guard/treasure, or skeleton crew/item disc to place on the tile You have 5 actions and these can be used in any combination or duplication to walk or run, fight fires, boost strength, eliminate deckhands, loot, or rest. You get fatigued based on each movement plus the difference between the fire level of the room you move into from your previous room (if it’s a higher fire level). The rules are different if you’re looting. Guards and skeleton crew attack you as soon as you enter the room, so they’re a “free” action. When these are defeated they flip over and you can use an action to pick up the treasure chest or item. IF YOU WANT TO WIN, you have to pay an equal amount of attention to fighting fires and eliminating deckhands, because once all the tiles are laid out, the Skellit’s Revenge card played at the end of each player’s turn will increase the fire levels and the amount of deckhands by a crazy amount. The deckhands spread out into rooms that have fewer amounts of deckhands in them, or are added to each tile with a trapdoor (so when all the tiles are laid you’ll have up to 7 deckhands (maybe more if you don’t strategize) added to the board each time a player completes their turn. This can get out of control quickly and once you run out of deckhands to place, you lose. If the amount of treasures you need to loot is made unavailable, you lose. If the fire dice reach 6 or the level of the powder barrel in some rooms and too many powder barrels or rooms explode, you lose. If your way off the ship is blocked off, you lose. If everyone dies and no more replacement characters are available to continue the game, you lose. It’s very easy to lose. After proclaiming all the above, this is probably the most difficult-to-win board game I’ve ever played. After maybe eight or nine arduous play-throughs with various friends, we have yet to win this game without accidentally cheating (one win out of nine, and we were unintentionally cheating pretty badly for it to happen). That being said, this is still my favorite co-op board game, and probably still overall all-time favorite board game. Dead Men Tell No Tales is a blast when you strategize with everyone and work together to help cover areas and other players. Even when you lose you still enjoy the time spent. I would absolutely recommend this game to board and strategy game enthusiasts. I would love to get the Kraken expansion, but I can’t until we win this game at least once!

   

2. B. M. Burdge Verified Buyer – 19 April 2025

   It took a few tries, but we finally beat this game on easy. It’s like a suped up, complexified version of Flash Point, with pirates!
   I really enjoyed the gameplay and the theming is great. The components are also solid and look nice on the table. The only downside to this game is the rulebook, which was just weirdly organized (to me anyway)–it took until the third playthrough to get all the rules down. It’s not a super heavy game or anything, but it was more complex than I was expecting.

   I definitely recommend this game–it’s been a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to playing it with more people.