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Forgotten Waters Review

Forgotten Waters Review

Forgotten Waters Review

Welcome to our review of Plaid Hat Games‘ Forgotten Waters! We’ll attempt to give you our take on this fascinating game in this review. Forgotten Waters is a game for 3 – 6 players; however, this review will include elements of the two-player variant mode as well. It’s not an easy game to review as a lot is going on in this game.

In Forgotten Waters, each player takes on the role of a pirate. The game is story-driven, and the goal is to complete the story. Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure style board game. The game box comes with four different adventures, each with stories and objectives of their own. Most of the game is cooperative. However, there are opportunities to steal treasure from your fellow pirates, and everyone has a unique ending to their story which makes the game exciting. So let’s get into our review of this fun game!

Game Components

The two main items in the game are the ocean map board and the Location Book. The ocean map board is where you lay down hexagonal tiles to create the unique map for this adventure. The Location Book is where you will pick your actions for each round. 

Additionally, there are seven different roles a pirate can have on the ship, each with its own tracking board and associated tokens. Overall the quality of the pieces is impressive. We like the illustrative detail in the Location Book. Those illustrations evoke where your pirates are currently. We also like the different details of the ship role boards and tokens. It’s a nice touch to have the crew token with his mouth open which lets you see a number on the crew track. That number represents how hungry the crew is currently.

As well as the book, this game does use a website to advance the story. The website helps with scenario setup and provides the narrative story as the players play. 

Players can read this story in their best “piratey voice,” or the game has a brilliant voice acted narration provided by an entire cast of characters. The website itself is ok, and we like that you can put it in offline mode when you don’t have an internet connection. 

The final component we’ll talk about here is the pirate story sheets. The game comes with a pad of pirate skill sheets, and each one is different. Other than keeping track of your character’s skills (which get upgraded throughout the game), these sheets provide a fun opportunity to tell your pirate’s unique story through the use of Mad Lib style fill-in-the-blank questions used when reading your story aloud. Our only complaint, and it’s a minor one, is that it is a finite pad of pirate sheets. Once you’ve used them all, you need to print more copies from the website. We’d love to see a digital version of the pirate sheet that each player can load on their device, and they answer the initial fill-in-the-blanks which in turn fills in the story on their device. They then can read the appropriate section as needed. As we say though, this is totally minor, just a thought we had while playing.

Game Setup

Overall, the setup for Forgotten Waters is pretty straightforward, but it does take a few minutes to layout everything. We’ll discuss a little about our personal setup here. To start, we each took a copy of those “Pirate Skill Sheets.” I was the “Grifter Pirate” for our game. My Pirate name was Potty-Mouth Wally (which I got by rolling two dice and looking up the Pirate name generator in the back of the instruction book). This sets the tone of the game, which is quite irreverent. Then since there were only two of us playing, we divided up the roles. Each role keeps track of one aspect of the ship and its crew; I was responsible for tracking each pirate’s Infamy, the boat’s hull, and our supplies. My partner was in charge of the Ship log, Crew, our current objective (which changes throughout the scenario), and the ship’s cannons.

In a regular 3-6 player game, these get divided up amongst each player as evenly as possible. Then in our game, we each took three pirates and a die matching their color. Again this is the two-player variant, and usually, everyone takes one pirate and their die. Finally, we used the website to set up the ocean layout, including tiles for islands, rock formations, and other enemy ships. The website also told us the starting value of the boat’s hull, supplies, and crew. 

Then we were ready to play. 

Gameplay

Forgotten Waters is a very engaging game to play, and it is damn funny too! 

Each round starts with your ship arriving at a location. The website usually has a narrated lead-in and then tells you which page to turn to in the Location book. When you turn to the page, the group has 40 seconds to put their pirate down on an action from the list on the page. That list is usually 7 items long.

Some actions are required, while others only one pirate may do and others many pirates may do in the same round. The time limit is meant to prevent you from having time to read what happens if you choose an action. The instructions tell you not to read what the actions require you to do before choosing them. This is so you don’t pick an action directly based on the outcome. That said, the action names themselves do have symbols beneath that offer clues to what is either required or an outcome from doing an action.

After everyone has chosen an action, one by one, each pirate performs their action from top to bottom on the list. Some actions will increase a pirate’s skills which you add to your pirate skill sheet. Skills are often “checked.” Checking a skill means rolling your die and adding the result to the number of that skill on your skill sheet. Also, you get treasure and story cards throughout the game that add additional points to those skills. Finally, once you have your total, you read the action-outcome next to the number in the Location Book. Like a total of 1-6 — do this and 7-12 — do that.

Depending on the action, this may allow you to add supplies, fix the boat, feed the crew, or direct you to read a numbered entry on the website. These last option, in our opinion, are the best part of the whole game. When reading (or having the cast voice act it) it made you feel part of the story. The writing and associated voice acting are entertaining and made us laugh out loud on several occasions. The story plays out in a very comedic fashion, which we loved. 

Some actions have you read an entry on the website that is a “Crossroads Event” These are usually more significant events that will affect how the rest of the scenario plays out. 

You’ll be doing everything from sailing the ocean, to fighting enemy ships, to arm wrestling the barkeep (not a joke). All narrated by a wonderful cast. Another shout out to the sound design. I used to do theatre myself and have created sound design for shows, so I know how difficult it can be to create and source this. In Forgotten Waters, this is exciting and keeps you right in the moment. Whenever you read an entry from the website or flip to a page in the book, the background audio represents where you are in a very immersive way. We play this game bluetoothing through our surround sound. If you are having a cannon battle on the high seas, you’ll be hearing the cannon blasts. In a tavern, you’ll hear all the pirates and glasses clinking. 

The game also is set up in two parts. Each scenario has a halfway point, allowing you to stop and save your game. The back of the ship’s log has a blank ocean map for you to record your current state. Too many games don’t offer a way to “save and come back later” we wish more would go this route. A scenario can take 2-3 hours to finish, so not a quick game but rewarding. 

Also and I touched on this earlier, but it warrants more detail, throughout the game, each pirate can add a star to their constellation (see below). Each pirate type has its own pattern on the pirate skill sheet. As the Grifter Pirate, mine was an Octopus shape. Once you fill in a star that has an exclamation mark, you’ve reached a constellation event. Your pirate’s personal goal is to gain at least four of these by the end of the game. These constellation events allow you to read another “mad Lib” entry for your pirate. You get to read your pirate’s end story at the end of the game, which can be Bad, Good, or Legendary, depending on the number of constellation events you’ve received. Also if as a group you complete the scenario, you don’t all automatically win. Each pirate needs to achieve at least the “good” ending. Alas, I didn’t in our game, but it’s still fun!

Overall Impressions

Forgotten Waters is full of surprises, and it keeps you engaged for the whole time you are playing. We thought that the two-player variant would mean you lose a lot of the game, but we found it was super fun to play. The main differences in a two player game is how you gain infamy and your constellation stars. Normally you gain stars through actions in the game, however in the two-player any time the game tells you to gain a star, you instead gain infamy +3 which moves you along the infamy track. Once your reach the top, any more infamy moves you back to the bottom, but you get to fill in a star at that point. This really streamlines the process of getting stars. It also ensures that one person is not always at the top of the infamy track. That pirate is usually the one who makes decisions in the game. We liked how that kept changing.

We loved the voice acting, the narration, and how the writing was so funny. The illustrations in the Location book are gorgeous and remind us of the Monkey Island series of video games which I am a massive fan of them as well. 

The only thing we think could be better is the website itself. Maybe Plaid Hat Games could turn it into a native iPhone or Google Play app. We understand that it is more cost-efficient to do it as a website. (full disclosure I was a web/app developer in a past life as well as doing theatre, so totally understand) The need for an app is simply a minor comment in an overall great game. 

We’d highly recommend this to anyone who loves to play thematic story-driven games.

If Forgotten Waters is a game that interests you, check out the game in our store. We have a few copies available.