Is Feed the Kraken Worth It? An Honest Review [PHOTOS]

Feed the Kraken is a hidden role deduction game that takes place at sea and features the likes of pirates, sailors and crazy cultists. In fact, it’s billed as a sailor’s favorite hidden-role social deduction game.

The game set sail on a Kickstarter campaign in 2020 and the project met its funds within a few weeks.

I was able to try it out recently and play the Deluxe Version, which features large, quality nautic objects and miniatures.

So was the game worth the hype? Actually, I think it was. More on that below.

An overview of Feed the Kraken

In this game, all players are assigned the role of either sailor, pirate or fanatic cult leader.

Each turn, the ship moves in one of three possible directions, toward a goal for one of the three types of players. Each move gets players one step closer to their win condition.

A captain, lieutenant and navigator will have the ability to choose the course for the ship. Players must decipher who is who and land the ship at their preferred final destination to win.

How many people can play Feed the Kraken?

The game plays 5-11 players.

With most social deduction games like this one, try to gather at least 6 crewmates for maximum fun.

Setting up the game

To set up the game, place the ship on the starting area of the map and place the action tokens in their corresponding spaces.

Then, shuffle 5 cult ritual cards and put them face down and spread out on the edge of the board.

Set aside the proper number of off-duty signs.

If it’s your first time playing, remove one yellow, one blue and two red cards from the navigation deck. Shuffle the remaining 19 navigation cards and place them in the draw pile.

Note: This is a basic summary. For additional information, see your rulebook.

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Distributing the secret teams

Players receive a token that will determine their secret faction.

At the start of your journey, distribute the roles and let players know where their true loyalties lie. (See the chart in your rulebook for details).

There will be a secret gathering of the pirates where everyone will close their eyes, except for the pirates who will acknowledge each other silently.

Game phases in Feed the Kraken

The game follows phases that go like this:

1. Appointing the navigation team
2. Question of loyalty
3. Navigation
4. Off-duty

Appointing the navigation team: The first captain chooses a player to be lieutenant and navigator.

Then, comes the question of loyalty: The rest of the crew can mutiny if they do not like the captain’s choices. Fellow players will place a number of tokens in their hand. At the count of three, everyone reveals their tokens. A token dropped counts for a vote.

Tie or majority means a successful mutiny. In this case, the current captain must hand over their duties and whoever dropped the most tokens becomes the new captain.

Remember, you only have so many tokens throughout the game, so use them wisely.

The navigation phase

If everything resolves, the navigation goes as follows:

The captain draws the top two navigation cards. Then, the lieutenant draws the next two cards.

Both players look at the cards and choose one to discard facedown into the deep sea (discard pile). Then, they place the remaining card in the logbook.

Finally, the chosen navigator secretly looks at the two cards and chooses one to discard into the deep sea.

The navigator leaves their final decision card in the logbook and returns it to the captain, who reveals the remaining card and takes the resulting action.

The captain keeps the card in front of them and moves the ship in the direction of the colored arrow on the map.

If there’s an icon on the map, take that action. Lastly, take the action of the corresponding navigation icon, pictured on the logbook above.

The navigator is now off-duty. If playing with 7-8 players, the lieutenant is also off duty. In 9-11 player games, the whole team is off-duty.

The goal of the game

Each role will have a different win condition.

The loyal sailors win as a team if the ship reachers Bluewater Bay (the blue area).

Pirates win as a team if the ship reaches Crimson Cove (the red area).

Finally, the cult leader and cultists want to reach the Kraken. Alternatively, cultists can win if the cult leader is sacrificed to the Kraken.

The game ends when one of the win conditions is met. At the end of the game, all players reveal their loyalty chips.

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Strategy in Feed the Kraken

Like most social deduction games, you always want to pretend like you’re a good guy, even when you’re not.

If you’re a pirate, it’s in your best interest to gain the trust of your crew and pretend to be a loyal sailor. That being said, you can’t simply stay under the radar. There will be times when you have to lie in order to win.

If you’re a cultist, try to steer the ship towards the center as much as possible. You may need to toggle back and forth between helping the pirates and helping the sailors. Convert other players as much as possible, preferably someone who has a lot of remaining votes left.

Sailors, don’t lie to your fellow sailors and never pretend to be a pirate. It will do you no good.

Feed the Kraken board game review

To be honest, I was starting to tire of most social deduction games. However, I really enjoyed playing this one and it did surprise me.

It’s truly an intense experience. I enjoyed the theming and the ability to play as a sneaky pirate.

The cultist is a great addition to the standard two-team deduction game. Plus, the cult leader has a chance to convert another player. Different events like player elimination and cabin searches add to the twists and turns of the game.

While it’s similar to a game like Secret Hitler in a lot of ways, it does have more features and more chances for a player to be more involved than other deduction games, where a few people take the lead and dominate gameplay.

For example, each player gets a special ability they can use at different parts of the game, which can make it way more strategic when you have a lot of players.

The thing I love the most about it is how it tells a story, like when a navigator does not wish to carry out the commands of the lieutenant and jumps overboard instead.

The game we played was definitely an emotional roller coaster. It’s a sophisticated social deduction game and one that I’d definitely recommend.

This game is so much fun and worth the retail price of $55 at the time of this writing. For availability, check your local game store.

Have you played Feed the Kraken? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.