Pirates of the Caribbean Pocketmodel Game is great attempt by Wizkids to bring one of their flagship (pun intended?) marques to mass market appeal.

The game itself is well designed -- quite elegant in my opinion -- it's simple and fun so non-gamers will enjoy it, but with enough strategic depth that keep many miniature gamers coming back to it. It is NOT a naval simulation, and many grognards will balk at this game for that reason, but I believe they are looking at this from the wrong perspective.

Anyhow, the reason I mention this is that the game has a good following (though declining unfortunately) in the gaming community -- I still remember the day years ago when this little "[GAMEID=10653 Pirates of the Spanish Main]" game hit the scene and all my Warhammer buddies were flocking to it. This would have been an opportunity to expand the gamer base as this product had great shelf placement in big box stores in addition to summer blockbuster movie franchise.

However, as with most movie franchise products, timing is the key. This game was released months after the movie when the market had already been saturated by way too many toys and Pirates fatigue had set in. I never followed up on why this occured, so if anyone can shed light one it I would greatly appreciate it.

That said, it is still a good game to pick up for some pirating action. As this game is fully compatible all of the other Wizkids Pirates games (in fact they've all been rebranded them all to Pocketmodel to avoid the prior confusion of every expansion having a different name and no "base" game name), most of the time you can easily find a gaming group to join or introduce new players to it and buy other Wizkids Pirates sets to expand on this.

A summary of the positive/negative aspects of this game:

Game mechanics fit the theme well

The other reviews of the Pirates games describe this well, so I will not go into detail: each player has a small fleet of ships and every turn each ship may be given an action such as moving, shooting another ship, searching for treasure, etc.

All ships have varying statistics such as how fast they move, how much damage they can take, cargo hold, gun power, special abilities (if any, such as rolling a die to see if they get an extra free action each turn). Crews add flavor and additional abilities to each ship.

Suffice to say, it plays and feels like a ships and pirates and not an abstract bean (or beads, as it were...) counting boardgame.

Ship design and artwork

The cards look great, are easy to read, and the ships are colorful and eye-catching. Even though they use the same ship models are the previous Wizkids Pirates games, there color schemes are a bit more exciting than before. The Kraken looks fantastic.

Easy to get non-gamers interested

The fact that I got my wife -- who has practically no interest in gaming except to make me happy -- interested in this so much that she actually requests it sometimes (not often enough unfortunately), along with other anecdotal stories leads me to believe this is true.

"Common" cards with popular characters

Popular characters such as Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann can be easily found as "common" cards as well as having a "rare" version. Other collectible card games have been designing their sets like this for a while, but Wizkids only recently started this trend with Pirates and Heroclix within the past year.

Distribution/collation

I have no problems with this being a collectible game, but there have been some major issues with the distribution of the cards. Wizkids is notorious for this, unfortunately, as it happens about every 2-3 sets in all their game lines, and this has caused me to basically buy nearly all my cards off ebay (and yes, I do support my local game store everytime I play there but I only buy non-collectible stuff there).

With this set, I bought 4 limited tins and 4 special value boxes from Target -- from 3 different stores knowing this may happen -- and yet I still ended up with almost the same distribution of rares (or lack thereof, I believe I only picked up a rare in 50% of the tins/boxes; whereas past experience was about 95% of them had one). Plus the combination of commons/uncommons in each tin/box was almost of the same 2-3 patterns leaving me with tons of duplicates.

I've purchase limited edition tins and special value boxes of previous Pirates sets and they never have been this bad.

Fragility

As this is the same product as with the previous Wizkids Pirates games, the fragile parts of ships tend to break frequently. This is especially true as you are constantly removing masts when a ship is damaged. Storage and transportation are also an issue. Overall the materials are still quite solid so it's not a major issue.

Pirates vs. English

This was rather disappointing, as there are clearly other nationalities in the previous Pirates games and also in the movie. I don't understand how hard it would have been to make the French pirate and his ship, well, French. Anyhow, this is easily alleviated by introducing ships and crew from the other sets and mixing them.

It's the same game

I don't want to make this too much of a negative, but it is what it is. An advantage of it being simple to play is that it's easy to get non-gamers interested and a game can be played rather quickly. This of course means that it can get a bit trite after a while, though luckily Wizkids is always introducing new game mechanics to make it more interesting without making it too cumbersome.

The other issue is that with the ship stats being so limited, after a while they've reach all possible combinations of ships and special abilities. This is exacerbated by the fact that each set/expansion includes over 100 ships/crew which kills the variability rather quickly and leads to a lot of useless ships.