Tabletop Simulator - Tortuga 1667 DLC

To be honest I am a little disappointed in this DLC. The workshop community seems to provide far better games than this for FREE. The graphics are fine HOWEVER:- 1. There are no AI players 2. There seems to be no way to hot-seat over the network. By this I mean that every player needs their own PC and a copy of TTS (TableTop Simulator). This would be a perfect introduction to TTS, however, you cannot invite two people on the same PC/laptop/Mac to play as you can in some free mods like Carcassonne. For a game that is best played with at LEAST 3 (and up to 9) players, I find this VERY limiting 3. The scripted setup is VERY limited and if you attempt to create a game in TTS hot-seat mode, it is very difficult to choose three of the starred event cards and add them to the event deck (So difficult in fact that I never figured out how!)

This DLC is very well made. Scans are high-resolution, there's the right amount of scripting.

This is a fantastic game to play in person. You are a pirate assigned to a ship, and the goal is for you and your allies to win the most gold before the Spanish Armada arrives (which happens when all the event cards are played). Each player on the ship has different actions depending on their role (captain, first mate, cabin boy). What makes it unique is that you are dealt a "loyalty" card to assign you to the French or British side (if there are an odd number of players, one person is Dutch, who tries to end the game with a tie between French/British). Loyalties remain secret so you must play cautiously until you begin to figure out the other players who share your loyalty. If you're not careful, the pirates could mutiny or the captain could maroon a sailor to the island of Tortuga. Ships win gold by attacking the Spanish galleon or the opposing ship. Players on the island brawl to win gold for the French or British. Players can view event cards and strategically tell one another which cards to reveal or force other players to reveal cards, so there is a lot of talking and scheming that goes on. The conversion of this game to the virtual world looks great, right down to the background below decks on a ship with cannons nearby. My only concern with this game on TTS is that there is no scripting for setup, and some of the mechanics are hard to manage in the virtual world (e.g. picking up an event card, looking at it, and putting it back without revealing it to the other players can be tricky). It would be nice to have some kind of automation for handling votes, which happen frequently. Some of the pieces don't "snap" nicely into place, like the event cards placed on the mat, the vote cards that continuously need to be stacked and reshuffled, or the gold chests that need to be placed on the French or British side of the ship. This game is a lot of fun to play. It takes well over 40 minutes in my experience, but it's time well spent, and a great game option for a game that allows more than 6 (most fun with odd numbers 5-9).