Piña Pirata is a hand management card game.

Title: Piña Pirata

Year Published: 2014

Designer: Donald X. Vaccarino

Publisher: IELLO

Players: 2-6

Game Time: ~30 mins

Set-up Time: ~1

Ages: 7+

Theme: Animal Pirates looking for the Golden Pineapple

Mechanic: Hand Management

How to win: Score 3 points to complete your treasure map first.

Game Description

As captain of a pirate crew, your ultimate goal is to find the most incredible treasure of all times: the Golden Pineapple. The map leading to it has been cut in parts a long time ago and hidden in different places of the Caribbean Sea. In order to win the game, you will have to face and overcome all the other pirates also searching the Golden Pineapple map. Play your cards wisely to find the treasure and become a pirate of legends!

Piña Pirata Set-Up

Shuffle the cards and deal 8 to each player (7 in a 6 player game). Flip over the top card of the deck and you’re ready to go.

Piña Pirata Game Play

The game plays the same as Crazy 8s or Uno (let me finish!) where you take turns playing a card on top of the discard pile that matches at least one of the Pirates on there. If the top card is a Monkey/Parrot combo, play a card with at least a Monkey or Parrot on it etc

Can’t play a card? Draw a card and end your turn. Get rid of every card in your hand first and you win the round, easy.

That’s the basics, but it’s the Adventure tiles that make this game what it is. During setup you take the Adventure tiles, give them a shuffle and place 2 out for everyone to see and give each player one as a starting ‘Point’. These tiles are now two new rules that apply to the game.

After each round, the winner draws 3 and reads them; they keep one as a ‘point’, discard one to the bottom of the stack and add the 3^rd one into play as an additional rule.

Now, there are 2 ways to play this game. Cruise Mode and Treasure Hunt Mode.

Cruise mode is just playing multiple games in a row and players can drop in and out and it’s quite dull, but, this game is all about Treasure Hunt Mode, for me this is the ‘Proper Game’.

In this mode, everyone starts with a part of the Treasure Map, your goal is to win 3 rounds and complete the map showing a cross where the fabled Golden Pineapple is buried.

You keep up to 6 rules in play before you start replacing them.

Game End

The first player to complete the map wins.

Piña Pirata Round-Up

Theme

Pirates trying to complete a map to help them find a Golden Pineapple… why not? 🙂

Setup & Rulebook

Setup is easy and the rulebook is good. It’s only 4 tiny squares of paper and they STILL managed to put a vocabulary list in there.

Components & Artwork

The cards are nice, they’re a tall Tarot-ish size which works well for this game. They have symbols of the Pirates in the corner so no matter which way you hold them you know what’s on the other end.

The art is a lot of fun with cartoony anthropomorphised Pirates.

The box is one of those really great Iello square boxes with a magnetic latch. Not big enough to sleeve the cards which is the only picky thing I could say. Oh, and the holes for your fingers to get things out is pretty small but again, I’m being picky.

Ease of Teaching & Accessibility

It’s Uno, it’s obviously very easy to teach. Some of the rules cards can cause issues but most of them are OK.

You can always discard and replace any if people have an issue.

Piña Pirata Summary

So, I LOVE Uno! The problem is I do the same thing every game. I play the card I have to… If I have a choice I just try and leave myself with as wide a choice of colours and/or numbers and cross my fingers.

Piña Pirata has a tonne of rules, making it different every time.

“Recruiting” has the rule that whenever you play a Monkey the player to your right gives you a card from their hand. That makes Monkeys less valuable and playing them early means the player to your right could pass you a card with a Monkey on it.

But “Stowaway” lets you discard a card each time you play a Rat, allowing you to discard your Monkey card unplayed. Suddenly Rats give value to any card in your hand but are twice as valuable to a Monkey card.

Not knowing which rules are coming out game to game keep everything fresh.

Now, it’s not perfect. Some of these rules make you draw cards and as you’re trying to empty your hand this can drag the game out quite a bit.

This is a picture showing the Adventure cards I suggest removing, that still leaves 35 to play with:

Rating

love this game and I try and get as many people to play it as possible and everyone enjoys it.

I give it 8/10

This game is a member of my Board Game Hall of Fame!

Jesta ThaRogue