The name certainly invokes a sense of foreboding, doesn’t it? This game isn’t actually about dead bodies, but the suspense is well deserved, because Captain Carcass is a press-your-luck game! And like all luck games, there’s no knowing when yours will run out.
There are 10 suits in the deck. The lowest value cards of each are placed in Davy Jones’ Locker, while the rest are shuffled to form the Loot Deck. On your turn, you’ll draw these face-up into the Exploration Area, choosing each time whether to press your luck or Return to the Surface and empty the Exploration Area into your Hold. But wait! Each suit has its own Effect, and you have to resolve the card you’ve just drawn before you decide whether to keep going. Some of these are extremely helpful – for instance, the Anchor safeguards everything you drew before it, so even if you dive too deep, some of the loot is yours. Others, like the Giant Squid, are much more inconvenient… the Giant Squid forces you to place two more cards in the Exploration Area before you can choose to return to the surface.
A Diving Incident is triggered when you draw a suit you already have in the Exploration Area. Instead of relocating to your Hold, the whole lot goes to the Locker! (Listen, it’s a luck game. Sometimes, you were greedy and went for a seventh card. Sometimes, your first card was a Giant Squid, your second, Squid-mandated card was also a Giant Squid, and fortune is just not in your favor today.)
The game ends when the last card of the Loot Deck is revealed and that player concludes their turn. Scoring in this game is interesting: instead of adding all the points in your Hold, only the highest value card of each suit is counted. Add ’em up, and whoever has the most points wins!
Once you’ve got the hang of the core game, there are also some optional additions. There are Variant cards, which offer alternative rules surrounding gameplay or scoring – one such example is Over Troubled Waters, which triggers Incidents by matching value rather than suit. These help to keep the game fresh and new, even if you’ve played several times. The other optional set is Diver cards. Each player gets one, and with it, a special ability that changes the Effect of some suit. (Unless you’re playing the Saboteur, in which case your ability is bound to another person instead.) Some suits have multiple variations, such as The Romantic (1) and The Romantic (2) – the first draws Mermaids straight into their Hold instead of the Exploration area, and the second gets bonus points for having at least one Mermaid at the end of the game. If there’s any suit overlap between players when the Divers are dealt, the duplicates are simply discarded and replaced.
