by Brant Guillory, 18 April 2024 ~ #UnboxingDay
The original printing of Skull Tales, Full Sail! was a hugely popular Kickstarter campaign from over 7 years ago, and was highly-anticipated because it provided multiple modes of play, in a box crammed with attractive goodies. It sold out pretty quickly.
Well, they’ve brought out a second printing, but with limited distribution in English. So if you want it, you need to hit the Draco Ideas website and get your order in pretty quick. The guys were kind enough to send us a copy to help fuel our coverage.
Mandatory boxiness – front & back.
click images to enlarge
Not a small box
The game unpacks in layers, with a ton of new stuff each in each layer. There’s a tray of minis in the middle and an organizer tray across the bottom..
Some detail of the minis. The beige ones are keyed to the player cards, which the pale grey ones are keyed to the encounters / NPCs.
It’s a lot
Multiple stacks of map tiles, scaled to act as overlays as needed for the larger flat maps.
Multiple decks of cards, shrink-wrapped into 4 stacks, representing people, places, actions, events, and more
Coins, dice, gems, and the center connectors for the dials.
Character cards that you can choose to play
Open ocean encounters and hazards
Land-lubber encounters / NPCs
Reference cards
There are 4 different books in here – let’s see what’s in them
The first book has the initial rules that you need, a good index, and a lot of illustrations. While this looks like a high-toy-factor/low-complexity game, it’s not. Look, there’s optional rules for running around on roofs; they’re trying to cover a lot of bases (just look at the index).
Book two covers the ports, which includes a lot of personalities – and at least one, uh … ‘familiar’ face, or mask, however you want to describe it.
As we said, plenty of complexity and range of options here, include “Cabin Boy Mode”1
Book three gets you out to sea, describing voyages, ship-to-ship actions, and a wide variety of encounters, including a few fantastical ones.
The last book is the campaign guide, with the different ‘chapters’ of the story, explaining what’s needed for each encounter. There’s also a narrative section that’s heavily CYOA-inspired. The index looks more like a table of contents, but it’s there.
The open sea map tiles with scattered islands are largely geomorphic.
The tactical maps of the shore buildings are mostly geomorphic. The details are pretty good.
The port and island maps are more representative than detailed. It also means that you can reuse the port map for every port.
The ship-to-ship maps for boarding actions.
4 punchboards with a lot of different pieces – some larger tokens and cards, smaller markers, and multi-part dials that you need to assemble.
The detail on the minis is quite nice, and there’s a lot of them. They aren’t really scaled to the map, other than the bases of the minis fitting into the squares on the map. They’re much more representational than correctly-scaled, but it fits the ethos of the game.
We’ll definitely have more coming from this game in the next few weeks as we get a chance to play through some parts of it and learn all the different sub-systems.
Thanks for joining this month’s #UnboxingDay with the Armchair Dragoons and we hope you enjoyed a look under our hoods! You can always leave us your feedback in our #UnboxingDay thread, or in the comment area on this article, below.
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Unbox games for all of the rest.
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In the tabletop world of the best!
