Skull Tales: Full Sail arrived on the most-anticipated list Daniel (@dungeondive) drew up at the start of the year, and this unboxing is genuinely delighted with almost everything in the box — right up until it reaches the rulebook’s middle third.
The game is three games stacked: an adventure phase that crawls dungeons, a voyage phase that sails the Caribbean, and a port phase for upgrades, hiring and training. Daniel is enthusiastic about all three in concept. The adventure phase reads cleanly and offers an unusually wide action list — insult, push into pits, reload, break away, take breath. Permanent wounds can cost a character an eye, a hand or a leg, and losing both of anything retires the pirate, with the surviving crew paying for their comfortable island retirement. The components are excellent, and the expansion’s organised mini tray gets a small ovation.
Then the voyage phase, which he describes as a brick wall: a list of things you may do, with no sense of how or why, combat rules scattered across three or four sections, and enemy cards numbered in one place and described in another with nothing matching. Fans had already compiled nearly ten pages of errata, and he keeps finding errors the errata missed. He suspects the Spanish-to-English translation, though he notes native speakers report the same trouble.
His plea to publishers: spend the money on technical writers, not plastic. A lesser miniature never ruined a game; a broken rulebook can.
Daniel argues a rulebook deserves more budget than the miniatures. Which game in your collection was rescued — or wrecked — by its rules writing?