Tanares: Expeditions is a cooperative pirate game that was on Gamefound back in November 2024. It finally arrived at my house in late April 2026.

What Is This?

What is Tanares Expeditions: Central Sea? It’s basically Gloomhaven with a pirate theme! You fight a bunch of minor bad guys on the way to fighting a big bad boss on every quest!

Players quest! Players each play as a pirate exploring a map! That’s not quite true; there must ALWAYS be four pirates, no matter the number of players! So, a 4-Player game works best, as each player gets their own pirate to play! Other player counts can work, but you have to either take control of multiple pirates or do something special (that isn’t well specified) using something called comrades. I found the comrade rules very underspecified and underwhelming, so I always just played with 4 full pirates with full abilities. It’s a lot of work (especially for the solo player operating all 4 pirates), but you get used to it … after a quest or two. It’s still a lot of work to operate multiple pirates, even if you do use the comrades rules … so just play as full pirates.

Pirates fight! They roll barrels! (Seriously!)

Each quest offers “about” 4 encounters where it’s tactical combat! Each combat is unique and different! A full quest takes about 2.5 to 3 hours, with each encounter in that Quest being about 30 to 45 minutes.

Each combat is a little different and a little special; you don’t always do the same thing! There are challenges (see above) that help give the combat a lot of flavor! Sometimes you have to roll barrels to kill opponents, sometimes you have to push them into spikes, sometimes you get drunk on Grog, and sometimes you have to bat them into the hole with the Kraken! (I am not making this up). You can still win the combat if you don’t succeed at the challenge (BTW, the word challenge wasn’t in the Index, so you have to go looking to find it), but it’s better to succeed at the challenges if possible! Succeeding at challenges allows to activate your Sea Blessings sooner and better!

Sea Blessings are arguably the best part of the game! Basically, after each encounter, each pirate gets a new Sea Blessing! The Sea Blessings enhance each pirate character and allow them to feel more powerful very quickly! Since each Quest is “about” 4 encounters, you will have a full raft of Sea Blessings (no pun intended … well maybe a little)! See below for four full Sea Blessings active!

These Sea Blessings are also unique to your character type! Captain Mavra (above) is a Controller type which tends to focus on upgrading her abilities to do magic damage from far away! See above as she has 4 of her Sea Blessings out! Each Sea Blessing really makes her feel a little more powerful! And of course, you get some choices on the Sea Blessings that come out, so you can make your own combos!

There are 4 character types: Healer, Tank, Controller, and Striker. All quests must have four pirates, with one of each type. See above for the Healer.

See above as the solo player BARELY keeps all four sets of pirates cards together! Yes, this game takes up a LOT of real estate!

Probably the second coolest thing about this game is the powers: each pirate has two main Attacks (far left) and 1 Ultimate Attack (far right)! You can use the main Attacks all the time (once per turn), but you can only use the Ultimate Attack once per Quest!

Oh, and you’ll notice the Kickstarter awesome version of this game came with plastic stands to hold cards. These were completely unwieldy and took up waaaaaaay too much space for the solo game. We’ll see how much we like them in a 4-Player game? Honestly, I don’t think I would recommend them at all. I kept knocking over the cards. UPDATE: Andrew and I hated them and didn’t play with them. Sam and Teresa kept theirs the whole game, but their cards got knocked over quite a bit.

Sure, it looks cool all set up with these card holders (above) but I found them unusable. They got in the way, the cards fell down all the time, and I couldn’t see the map!

It was kind of a mess to player 4 characters solo, but above (with the 4 characters all scrunched together) worked MUCH better than the plastic card holders. Your mileage may vary.

Minis and/or Standees.

Players are pirates fighting pirate-themed bad guys. I got the Kickstarter version which has Minis.

There are bunch of minis; most of them are bad guys you fight! Bad pirates, Spiders, Goblins, etc. the standard pirate stuff!

Some of the minis (the big bosses, see above) are even painted!

So, I got the painted version of the game, but not all my minis are painted? Just a few? Shrug? Just so you know that not ALL your minis will be painted.

Here’s some bad guys (above and below) with their stats card and minis.

The minis seem to correspond pretty well (we had trouble correlating minis to cards in The Last Spell from a few weeks ago). So that was nice.

Combat

Combat order is decided by the initiative deck! See above! Each pirate gets a card and each bad guys gets a card.

See other side of the initiative cards above.

Once the Initiative cards are laid out, they stays like that for the rest of the encounter. See above! Those of you who have played Dungeons & Dragons might recognize this; this feels very much like the initiative system from D&D! In fact, you can even use special powers to “slightly modify” your turn order! To be clear, this is NOT Variable Turn Order (like we saw last week in Aeon’s End: Beyond the Breach)! Once the cards are out, players know the order that everyone will activate for the rest of combat! So, it may suck that the bad guys goes twice or even thrice in a row, but it’s predictable, you know it’s coming, and so you can work with it or around it!

Oh! One of my favorite parts of the Initiative system is that a Sea Curse (see above) defines attack preferences for that round! One of these cards come out every round, revealing some bad news, but more importantly: defining attack preferences!!! Bad guys are red or blue in this game, and you can see that each round has the attack preference VERY WELL DEFINED! “Red enemies go after the farthest enemy” and “Blue enemies go after enemy with fewest HP!” This disambiguations makes me very happy! They kind of dropped the ball though; if there’s a “tie”, … the players pick! No no no no no no! You already have a well-defined ordering in the initiative line! LEFT TO RIGHT! If there’s ever a tie, just use the leftmost character in the initiative line!!! ARGHGH!! ARGHGH! ARGHGH! ARGHHG! I have very strong feelings about this; I hate it when a cooperative game says “players choose”! (See my blog entry here about this: Resolving Ambiguity in Cooperative Games). They are SO CLOSE to getting it perfect; they should have use the leftmost character in case of ties! Done! So, this will be a house rule if you play with me …

This is a boss-battler; you (generally) have 3 minor combats on the way to a final combat with the boss! You have a decent chance of dying while you play … but there are many mechanisms for healing, and one-shot resurrections! This game really FEELS LIKE they want you to keep going! Even though the game is hard, there are enough mechanisms to keep you on-track … it almost feels like you have a DM who is trying to look out for you …

Campaign

To be clear, this is a campaign; you can see that designation on the cover.

The campaign is many Quests; see the quest book above! Each Quest is about 4 encounters long!

I said earlier that this game reminds me of Gloomhaven; and I stand by that. There is flavor text and story in the game … about as much as Gloomhaven (some story but it’s not the main emphasis). The main emphasis of the game is the tactical combat on the many different maps.

Each Quest (see the first one above) has about 4 encounters, and may actually span multiple maps. I would say each quest is “about” 2.5 hours to 3 hours? It depends on how much you know. Sure, my first quest was probably 4 hours, but it was a learning quest.

There IS an overarching story going on here! I gotta be honest, I kinda like the story! It feels very thematic and piratey! Each Quest, when you end, gives you upgrades and takes you to the next part of the story! The game DOES have a branching adventure … again, very much Gloomhaven.

The campaign and game feel very much a like a Gloomhaven style campaign; a story evolves, but the main emphasis is on the tactical combats (usually 4 encounters per Quest).

Upgrades

One of the best parts of this game is how many upgrades you see as you play!

We’ve already mentioned the Sea Blessings! You get a new Sea Blessing (from a deck of 5 you chose) after every encounter, so you get upgrades mid-quest to help you feel more powerful!

And at the end of every Quest, you get to upgrade your Sea Blessings so you can choose better ones! You can choose Sea Blessings that combo! You can choose Sea Blessings that fit your play-style! If each encounter is “about” 30 minutes each, that means you get a Sea Blessing every 30 minutes! It feels good to get those!

After some Quests, you get loot! See above.

After each Quest, you also usually get to upgrade an Action! See as Captain Mavra’s Tentacles Action is now level 2!

These upgrades follow you as you play; this is a campaign after all! You always feel like you are upgrading, which is a really great feeling!

Ships

Wait! There’s also ship-to-ship combat! No pirate game is complete without some ship-to-ship!

It’s not all the time, but on some quests, you must sail the Seven Seas! On Quest 3, I got to sail!

The sailing part of the game is VERY different! You have very different rules for shooting and ramming other ships! But, they seem fairly well-defined on just 2 pages of the rulebook! See above! You also don’t get Sea Blessing (boo hoo) in the sailing parts of the game. Or powers. You just do what your ship does!

If you flip your character card, you have a ship on the other side! When you sail your ship, you get to choose two things: your Crew and your Attack! See above as Captain Krog chooses a defensive crew (+3 defense) and Lightning as an Attack!

The basic combat still works, more or less, the same way! You have Initiative cards for your ships and the bad guys ships!

There’s a bunch of bad guys ships that come out (see above), each with their own weapons and weaknesses!

The sailing part of the game feels VERY different … but it still feels very piratey and thematic! I cheated a little bit to make sure I made it to the end. The good news is that, even if your ships sinks, it can come back … once. If all four pirate ships sink twice, well, then you lose. You probably will lose at least one ship, but it’s good to know you have at least one resurrect.

I liked the sailing part of the game; it really fit nicely in and really gave the game a lot of variety!

What I Liked

Art: I adored the art in this game. It’s VERY piratey and thematic.

Components/Minis. The components were all high-quality and worked really well. They looked really cool on the table.

Upgrades. Between new Sea Blessings between encounters and upgrades to Main Actions between Quests, you always feel like you are advancing and getting better. It happens quite a bit!

Sea Curse and Resolving Ambiguity: They almost got the ambiguity resolution perfect; the Sea Curse cards do a great job of helping describing attack resolution! See above! They unfortunately don’t say anything on “ties”: as a House rule, use the leftmost relevant player Initiative card to resolve ambiguity in case of ties.

Story: there’s not THAT much story, but I like what I have seen. The campaign seems well-defined.

Combats all feel different! Each combat, so far, feels very different! I rolled some barrels, I shoved into some spikes, I got drunk! sailed some ships! Everything I have seen feels just a little different and gives it a nice flavor. The Challenges really enhance that flavor too.

What I Was Annoyed Over

Dice Based: Combat is dice-based; it would remind you a lot of Dungeons & Dragons as you roll a 20-sided die and have to be over the enemy Defense. If you are rolling badly, you can just lose lose lose and it’s not fun. Sure, there are buffs, sure there are a lot of mechanisms to help you (two free resurrections!), and sure it’s just the nature of dice. I found that I had to cheat once of twice to keep the game going because of one or two bad rolls! This is one place where this is more like Dungeons & Dragons and maybe a little less like Gloomhaven.

Rulebook and Rules. There are a LOT of rules. I played a bunch of gams, and it felt like it took a while to converge to what the rules where. The rulebook is ok; it has an Index but it is incomplete (Area of Effect? AoE? Challenge?). I used it it a few times and it worked, and a few times and it didn’t. (When an Index doesn’t work, it means you have to linearly scan the entire rulebook to find a rule). I guess I’d rather have an Index that not, so maybe I’ll count that as a win.

Player Summary Cards. Seriously, only two Player Summary cards? And they are DIFFERENT? We needed at least four Player Summary Cards! My friends are fine sharing (we usually shared Player Summary cards, one per side of the table), but it was annoying to constantly be going back and forth.

Always Four Players: Gloomhaven did a great job balancing the game for different player counts; there were set-ups for 2, 3 and 4-player games! In this game, there must always be 4 pirates! It works, I understand why they did it, but it makes it harder to play the solo game (even with the comrades rule, you are still operating 4 pirates).

Conclusion

So, what’s a pirate’s favorite letter? C (for the Seven Cs!) for solo mode, and B (for Be eating lemons or you’ll get Scurvy) for the cooperative mode.

It’s probably a 7.5/10 for the solo mode; I still want to keep playing the solo campaign. I was a little bummed when I had to reset the campaign so I could play cooperatively with my friends (yes, you can reset the campaign). It wasn’t THAT much state to reset, and I have taken pictures to keep track of the decks (the state is mostly your choices for base Sea Blessings), but it was a little work. The worst part of the solo mode is just how much work it is to operate four characters AND the bad guys AND do maintenance! You can use the comrades cards to mitigate this work a little, but that gets rid of Sea Blessings which are arguably one of the best parts of the game. So, that workload for the solo players brings down the score a little.

I would absolutely recommend playing this solo for at least 3 Quests (partly so you see ship-to-ship combat) and to converge to the rules. There are a lot of rules, and the rulebook could have been better. The rules are mostly all there. I think diving right in to this with an uninitiated group is a recipe for disaster! Play it solo to learn it, then teach your friends.

Cooperative play is pretty darn good. 8/10. A lot of cooperation emerges as everyone discusses ways to get the best results using their pirates and traits! Each pirate is very different! It’s pretty clear that four players (one player per pirate) is the optimal way to play. I could see doing a 2-Player game (two pirates per player) or maybe a 3-Player game (one per, and a shared pirate?), but I always prefer when I get one character to focus on and inhabit. My group still want to keep playing, so we’ll be heading into the campaign for the next few weeks. So far, it’s been a hit.

A pirate’s favorite letter is R! ARGHHHHH when you are learning the game and coming up to speed with everything; it’s a lot of work. Once you get into it, I think you might enjoy it. Hopefully this review will help you see if this is for you.

Oh yes, this would make our Top 10 Cooperative Swashbuckling Games!