Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot

Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot is a cooperative card-driven adventure game that I ended up playing with my 6yo twins because they like pirates. The box says ages 10+, but the story and art seem appropriate for younger kids (it did have one mild swear word). It seems more like a solo game since you’re just controlling one character and deciding together what choices to make, but that also works for me playing with my kids.

The game is pretty much like a choose your own adventure point and click type board game. It has a deck of Scene cards that you discover and lay on the table, and you have a little meeple that you move around to explore the new Scene cards. Each scene card has Interaction cards that describe what’s going on. You can interact with the Interaction cards (some are mandatory and happen right away, while others you’ll choose to interact with) by flipping them over and reading the back. There’s also a deck of Item cards that are labelled with letters and numbers, and sometimes you’ll use them for interactions. Depending on which item you use, there will be a different outcome, but once you interact with a card it’s discarded so there are some branching paths. But the main story is the same so it’s not super replayable. I just ended up looking/reading through the cards and interactions we didn’t get at the end of the game.

The rules are fairly simple and everything is in the cards. For example, you’ll interact with a card that says to place Scene cards 2, 3, and 4. The backs of those scene cards show how they’re oriented together, so you place them face down, and then you can move to one of them to turn it over and take out the matching interaction cards. There are also Feat cards that are like your goals, and the interaction cards will tell you if/when you complete those. Because of the simple rules and everything being on the cards, there were some rule questions in my playthrough and some things that I wasn’t sure about. But since this is more of a story choose your own adventure experience, I didn’t mind.

The game lasted us about 90 minutes total, but we split it up into 4 different sessions on weeknights. It’s actually really easy to pause and save your progress, since you can just put the cards you have in a bag and the Scene cards themselves show you how to set them up. Also there are natural stopping points in the game where you switch locations (and remove all the Scene and Interaction cards). It did end up taking up a lot of table space and by the end we had a bunch of items to keep track of. My kids fidget a lot (and climb on the table) so that made it especially hard to keep track of the items, but I think with normal play it would be manageable.

For replayability, we ended up doing pretty well in our playthrough so I just read through the branches that we didn’t see and I don’t think it’s worth playing through again. I don’t think there’s a way to lose without making it to the end and a lot of the main story is the same, so you’d mainly be replaying it to get a better score and read the optional branches. I didn’t actually mention scoring yet since that wasn’t important to me, but there are 8 reputation tokens and you can lose or gain reputation during the game based on your interactions. I personally don’t care much about that in story-driven games, but one of my kids was very worried whenever we lost reputation.

Overall, Lost in Adventure: The Curse of Jack Parrot is a fun pirate adventure story that I think is good to play solo or with kids as a choose-your-own-adventure type game, as long as you don’t mind making your own rules decisions sometimes. The lack of replayability might make it not worth it, but it’s not destroyed so you can pass it on when you’re done.