At Gen Con this 12 months, veteran household sport writer HABA Video games launched its latest providing Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy. Whereas the sport is available in the usual Haba field, what’s as an alternative is something however.

That is the primary legacy sport providing from HABA video games and it’s aimed squarely at households. That’s proper, you’ll be opening bins, inserting stickers, and including guidelines over the course of the marketing campaign. Are your youngsters prepared for his or her first legacy expertise?

Gameplay Overview:

The fundamentals of Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy is fairly easy. This cooperative sport duties gamers with shifting wood sailors round a ship to their matching-color oars. On a participant’s flip, they might transfer a sailor one house alongside an unblocked, linked path. They then cross the Capt’n Pepe ball to the following participant who takes their flip.

That is all performed in real-time as a sand timer is operating within the heart of the ship. As soon as the timer runs out, gamers depend what number of sailors are standing subsequent to the oar that matches the animal’s shade and rating a degree for every. Then the oars are reset and gamers attempt once more. After three rounds, gamers will whole up their factors (max of 15) and rating rewards based mostly on how nicely they did. Rewards are within the type of stickers to position on their nautical map, and as you earn extra factors you’ll be allowed to position extra stickers.

Sport Expertise:

The core gameplay loop of Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy is tremendous easy. Transfer guys across the ship and get them the place they must be. The problem comes not solely from the real-time facet, however in determining learn how to transfer folks the place they should go. Since you possibly can’t transfer somebody by one other particular person, you’ll want to maneuver folks out of the way in which to get them by.

Because the marketing campaign progresses, this turns into a bit harder as the sport throws wrenches into the works. It could be a crate it’s a must to slide out of the way in which, crabs that cease an individual from shifting, or the requirement that somebody to cross by the cannon on the ship. To keep away from spoilers, I’ll save the remainder of the unlocks for gamers to find on their very own. However for probably the most half, the unlocks serve so as to add a tougher problem to the sport

So far as the gameplay itself, my youngsters appeared to take pleasure in it for a bit, however I don’t assume it was their favourite. Every sport requires you to play three rounds, and it begins to get repetitive. Whereas the sport does attempt to make issues extra attention-grabbing by throwing extra challenges at you, the core loop is essentially the identical, and to be trustworthy, not all that attention-grabbing. To finish the marketing campaign, you’re looking at about 75 rounds (25 missions, 3 rounds per mission) of the sport… which was simply method an excessive amount of for me.

The opposite problem I discovered is that this can be a puzzly sport by nature, and it may be tremendous irritating once you see the trail each piece must go to get the place they must be, however different gamers don’t. I swear my son is secretly a traitor as half the time he strikes a chunk the other of the place it must be. Ultimately, I began casually main them to the appropriate path by leaving the apparent strikes for his or her turns, and those that required planning forward for mine. It may be actually arduous for somebody to not attempt to quarterback this sport as soon as they discover the optimum path.

For my youngsters although, I believe their favourite elements happened exterior the precise sport. Opening up the key bins, inserting stickers, hell, even organising the sport all gave the impression to be their favourite elements. Typically they’d combat over which sticker was positioned and who bought to do it. At one level, my son determined he’d fairly “sit out and watch us play” and solely assist with the stickers. I ought to notice that the sport additionally comes with a voice-acted story that will captivate youthful gamers (my youngsters didn’t actually appear to care to hearken to the story, so your mileage might range on this one).

Last Ideas:

Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy is rather well made, from the wood bits, to the 3D ship, to the stickers, to the audio story. Nevertheless, none of us (notably the mother and father), discovered the gameplay mechanics to be all that a lot enjoyable. I believe as a quick-playing filler sport it could be fantastic, however as a prolonged marketing campaign, it was simply method too repetitive and irritating.

I’ll say that this was additionally one of many few household video games that I introduced from Gen Con that my youngsters aren’t incessantly asking to play on their very own, which is without doubt one of the benchmarks I exploit for household video games. They commonly ask to play the opposite two video games I introduced residence on the similar time: By the E-book and Hansel and Gretel. Sadly, Capt’n Pepe: Treasure Ahoy simply didn’t seize them like I had hoped for his or her first legacy sport.