Tortuga

Tortuga looked like a fun game on the box, and when you open it up there's just a deck of ships and a deck of treasures and a booklet with rules in 5 languages.  

I'm a fan of simplicity, so let's give it a spin.  For two players, the short version of the rules is:

Setup: Deal 6 ship cards to each player, and lay out 5 treasure cards on the table.

Play: Take turns choosing two ships and play them face down.  All players flip their ship cards at the same time.  Now, the highest numbered ship chooses one treasure card, next highest takes the next, then the next, and the player with the lowest card gets the two remaining treasures.  The only real twist here is that if you take a bomb you are expected to give it to the other player.

The treasures have a variety of scoring rules.  The necklaces form a group, so one scores 1 point, two score 2, three score 5, four score 10 and five score 15.  Emerald plus diamond is worth 6, they score nothing on their own.  Crowns and bombs are held and at the end of the hand, whoever has the most crowns gets +5 and whoever has the most bombs gets -5.  That's about it.

The rules say that the game ends after two hands of six cards are exhausted, but that's pretty quick when dealing out two at a time.  For two players it felt better playing three hands of six cards.

The one remaining twist is that certain ships have modifiers.  The first few will reverse the order that players take cards, so lowest ship goes first.  Others let you swap one of your treasures, or do similar things.  I ignored this for our introductory round to keep it simple, and when I did add these rules back in, they were a bit irritating.  We're getting tired of modern card games that always have to add extra little rules onto the cards, so you're always reading blurbs to figure out what to play.  Here, the actions were shown in pictographs instead of words.  They were well designed pictographs, but whatever fun card grabs they allowed just got swamped by always having to check for little logos and lookup what they mean.  I could see playing again in the future, still ignoring the ships' special powers, but it does feel a bit plain either way.

For more than two players (the default game rules), you each play one card per round, and deal out the number of treasure cards shown on a little grid.  Each ship then nets a single treasure card.  Nobody gets two treasure cards.

The game turned out okay, but we were pretty tired by then.