Captain Look

Today we are going to be playing Captain Look, a cooperative, sort of visual memory game for young kids from Pegasus Spiele. It’s been out for a few years in Germany as Isla a la Vista, but has only recently received an English release.

The general idea of Captain Look is that it’s a very light cooperative memory game where everyone works together to reach the correct island before the pirates catch up with you.

For your first game, use the island cards marked with one skull and the side of the board with three spaces. Assemble the ship and cannon, place the die in the cannon, and set the ship on the starting space. Shuffle the one-skull island cards, reveal the top card as your destination, then choose one of the story cards.

Next, prepare the telescope. Separate the telescope discs into those with and without a black border. For your first game, you only use the discs without black borders, but to be honest, the game is really easy, so you could just jump straight to the harder ones. Shuffle them face down and randomly insert them into the telescope. The remaining discs are returned to the box.

One player reads the story card aloud to set the scene before removing it from the game. The destination island is then revealed for 10 seconds so everyone can study it. Once time is up, cover the card again so it can no longer be seen.

The youngest player usually starts. They have to look through the telescope and describe what they can see on the visible disc without showing it to the other players. As a group, you decide whether that object appeared on the destination island you looked at previously.

I really like all this because it teaches some good skills to young kids, such as descriptive language (which, let’s be honest, most teenagers suck at), as well as discussion and teamwork.

If you think the object wasn’t on the island, place the disc beside the play area and the next player takes their turn. If you believe it was on the island, place the disc onto the next numbered space on the board and move the ship forward one space. Play continues until you’ve correctly identified all of the required objects and the ship reaches its destination.

Some spaces trigger pirate encounters. When you face a pirate with one flag, roll the die once. If you roll an explosion, you’ve driven the pirates away and continue your journey. If you roll a miss, remove one sail from your ship. Losing all three sails means the game is lost immediately.

Oddly, these dice rolls seemed a bit weird. In my head, the explosion should be the bad result, but whatever. This mechanic also feels oddly out of place as a roll-of-the-dice way to lose the game, with no real way to mitigate the danger.

Stronger pirates, shown with two pirate symbols, are tougher to defeat. Roll the die three times and score at least two explosions to win the battle. If you fail, remove one sail from the ship before continuing.

Once your ship reaches the island, uncover the destination card and check the discs you placed on the board. If every chosen object appears on the island, everyone wins. If any are incorrect, the whole team loses.

There are ways of making the game harder by using more difficult pirates and islands, but we never found anything particularly challenging, short of some unlucky dice rolls.

This is very much a game for young kids. It says 6+ on the box, but I reckon you could 100% go lower than that. Once you get into the late single digits, this is probably going to be a little too easy.

The components are really cool, and the way the telescope works is great fun. I do wish there was a way for the pieces to be held a little more securely. They only slot in on one side, so they can rattle around a little. This could have easily been fixed by adding a slot for them to lock into on the opposite side of the telescope, but I’m being picky. It’s a relatively low-cost game, and the components that come with it are cool.

I really like Captain Look for what it is, and that’s a simple memory game that teaches some great skills to young kids. It is, however, very much aimed at younger children.