Today is the last day to sign up for the Buccaneer's Booty Box in order to guarantee your copy of the Epic Seas Cursed Halloween Mega Pack at the lowest price!

I’m stoked to have checked a lot of boxes for this one:
-Epic crazy capital ship with huge cost and wild gimmicky nature
-Multiple sea creatures!
-Multiple game pieces that are capable of weaponizing terrain, one of my favorite concepts in Pirates and something I’m employing a ton in CG4 (the biggest Pirates game ever played).
-Two original ship types that are new to the relaunch (1 Mast Galley and Turtle Ship)
-The return of Cursed voodoo playing a role in the game’s story
-Typically gimmicky Cursed stuff, but still with some gold hauling capabilities on the smaller ships
-Various Cursed-style abilities such as Sea Monster, Fear, Hydra, Fog Hopper, global possession, plus all the wild new abilities
-Named crew that will really augment their ranks
-Apocalyptic and horrifying flavor text to take the game to a more Epic level – a “living” ship, summoning ancient beasts from mythology, mind control, a ghostly apparition, extermination and torture.

Originally I thought this release would have at least some theming around cannibalism and/or burning victims to death, but went in the directions of Terrain as a Weapon (TaaW), sea creatures, apparitions, extermination and voodoo instead (mostly based on gameplay preferences from the pool of Epic Seas game pieces I was selecting from). I absolutely love doing the historical releases and trying to make them as accurate as possible to what happened back then, but a fantasy release really allows me to flex some creativity and completely branch off from needing to stick to historicity all the time. It was quite fun to make!

I’m a decently big believer in factional identities and established strengths – Pirates should be awesome in general as they are the name of the game, England should win some wars, Spanish should have deep cargo holds, etc. Thus the Cursed stay wild and unique, with gimmicky powers that other factions simply don’t have access to. I don’t think the Cursed need some huge boost in the form of amazing conventional gold runners or powerful simple warships. When they win, I like when it rides on the back of their craziness and evil – weaponizing terrain and unique abilities/game elements, massacring crew, mind control, etc.  There’s a way to add game pieces to the established sets that helps a poorly-optimized faction win games, without compromising what they represent thematically. I’ve tried to do that here.

Unique factions are one of the strong thematic elements of this game, so generally I like it to stay that way. Some exceptions are fine on occasion (as seen on a few of the named crew here), but that’s generally my outlook on the topic, and why I don’t try to suddenly “fix” a crappy faction by just homogenizing their options in a boring way.

Now you can join The Apocalypse Movement… so all can perish….