Yarrr Har Hunt: A Family Board Game for Pirate Lovers
Peaceable Kingdom has a brand new board game in town, and that’s always big news around here. We’ve been playing Peaceable Kingdom games with our kids for about 5 years now - ever since our son was 2 - and the brand has a special place in our hearts because of it.
The newest game we’ve added to our collection is a pirate-themed game called Yarrr Har Hunt, and I already have it shortlisted for a potential place on our upcoming list of the best board games for 4-year-olds.
The game is officially rated for ages 4 and up, but it’s perfect for our 3-year-old daughter right now, and our 7-year-old son isn’t too old to join in on the fun either. Seriously, who could say no to a game with a name like Yarrr Har Hunt?
Disclosure: Yarrr Har Hunt was provided to us by publisher MindWare and Peaceable Kingdom with no expectation of a featured article. We choose the games that we recommend and all thoughts and opinions are are own.
Finding games for family game night that accommodate that age gap between our kids is always important to me - and Yarrr Har Hunt pulls it off because it’s simple enough for our little one but it has a very engaging presentation and theme that captures the interest of our son (and me too).
Yarrr Har Hunt features some of the best presentation by Peaceable Kingdom yet. The collection of cards and components found inside make it look great on the table. It’s a beautiful desert island game board with wonderful cartoon pirate character pieces that bring it to life.
I also very much appreciate the character biographies found in the rulebook. They’re all pretty funny, and my daughter and I both got a big kick out of those. In case you were wondering, Big Beard Barry has a pet parrot named Trixie that only eats orange jelly beans.
The leader of this gang of pirates is named Captain Casey, and her crew is on Shell Island searching for buried treasure. But there are three clues you have to collect on the game board before uncovering each treasure chest. To move about the board you pull a cardboard shell out of the handsome draw-string bag and move the number of spaces on your shell.
Some of the shells have a picture of a pirate boat on them, and drawing too many of those is how you lose. But there are also magical shells that feature a specific color and the ability to travel to different colored spaces on the game board. So the little ones get to practice a little bit of color matching on top of their number recognition and counting.
The clues for each treasure chest are marked with an X-marks-the-spot token - and you’ll find them all around the board. And when a pirate lands on an X-marks-the-spot-token, they collect that clue and turn over the next clue for that particular treasure chest. This is the part of the game our daughter likes the most, and she loves talking about all of the clues she collected long after the game is over.
And since this is a Peaceable Kingdom game, of course your mission is a cooperative one. You even have the ability to give your shell to someone else on your turn if you think moving their character would be more beneficial to the team. This feature of the game is where the teamwork and communication comes into play. The need to talk about strategy as a group has always been the thing that endears Peaceable Kingdom to us, and Yarrr Har Hunt is no exception.
Your mission, according to the game’s storyline, is to have your pirate crew collect all of the buried treasure before your ship returns to the island’s harbor to take you on your next adventure. You need to find at least one treasure chest for each player to win, but requiring more chests or more clues for each chest would be one way to increase the difficulty of the game.
As far as the story goes, it’s a mystery to me why we’re supposed to be worried about our own pirate ship arriving to the harbor too soon. And why Captain Casey’s boat sailed off without her in the first place is anybody’s guess. So, to be honest, we all prefer to imagine that it’s a rival boatload of pirates coming for a great battle with the intention of stealing all of our treasure.
Yarrr Har Hunt actually reminds us a lot of one of our other favorite board games for kids - Karuba Junior. In fact, if you own both games, this would be a great time to pull out Karuba Junior’s beautiful wooden pirate ship to use with Yarrr Har Hunt. The themes and stories about finding the buried treasure before a pirate ship reaches the harbor are very similar, but the mechanics and the benefits for kids are slightly different in both games.
While Karuba Junior is a tile-laying game that focuses on spatial reasoning, Yarrr Har Hunt has your pirate characters moving about the game board chasing clues while you practice numbers and colors. Both games are fantastic choices for young pirate lovers though, and we have already brainstormed many ideas for combining components from both games to build our own mega pirate game.
We’re big fans of having engaging themes in our board games, after all, and I love that Peaceable Kingdom shares those views about sparking imagination in kids. In fact, the rulebook specifically recommends that everyone talk like a pirate during the game. It sounds like they must know us pretty well over at Peaceable Kingdom headquarters, because that’s definitely our kind of family game night.
We’re actually beginning to build up quite the collection of pirate-themed games in our house now - and Yarrr Har Hunt is now a much-loved addition to that collection. I’m honestly ecstatic that Peaceable Kingdom continues to come out with new family games that cultivate cooperation and kindness - and that they provide young families with actual quality board games like this to play.
We’ll certainly be exploring Shell Island with Big Beard Barry, Captain Casey, and Pearl McFerl for many years to come. And then I foresee Yarrr Har Hunt living on our shelves with our other Peaceable Kingdom games -until our grown-up children come claim them to share with their own families one day.
Make sure to check out these featured articles on some of our other favorite Peaceable Kingdom games as well:
Mole Rats in Space
Race to the Treasure!
Gnomes at Night
What’s your favorite Peaceable Kingdom game? Do you have any pirate fans in your house? Have you tried Yarrr Har Hunt yet? Let us know in the comments!
