Ten points about Age of Booty.

1. The original title was better.

IGN says that this game was first known as Plunder. Waaaaaay better name.

2. $10 is a little steep.

There's only 21 challenge maps, and half of those are not particularly challenging. I suppose you could try for online multiplayer or local multiplayer to feel that the $10 has been well spent, but I still sort of consider those bonus modes.

3. The DLC is mostly junk.

But it is free. I was sort of excited by the prospect of buying a $10 game late (Age of Booty was released in October of last year, or something like that) and snapping up a bunch of free DLC packs in one go. But the DLC is mainly free maps, which, given that you can make your own maps, is kinda dopey. Some of the free map packs came with minor game enhancements, which is nice. But it's a bit of a red herring to dangle TEN tiny DLC packs, when they could easily have been combined into one large formal game update.

4. The final challenge board is impossible.

Ugh. You've got five factions on the seas, including you. You have six cities, and you need to control four of them to win. Or just control the most when the time is up. Ties do not count as a win. The timer goes for 18 minutes. Most of the other four factions start with a better ship than you do; one of the factions has two ships. The enemy ships will not always attack the leader, which would be logical. It seems like they would rather come after my one city than make a play to stop the inevitable win of the other AI player who is at three cities. It is extremely frustrating, and I can't find any FAQs online with meaningful advice on beating this one. There are two Trophies on the line: one for beating the string of Hard challenges, and one for beating all the challenges.

5. The real-time board game angle is very cool.

This is what sold me on the game. It looks like a hex-based board game. Like, you know, Settlers. The game also refers to the power-ups as cards, which is entirely unnecessary but adds to the tabletop aesthetic. Obviously it visually recalls WizKids' lamented Pirates CMG, although it plays nothing like that.

6. Controls are easy, but the tutorial is poorly explained.

I don't even know if there was a tutorial, now that I think about it. It took me a couple boards to realize what the HUD was telling me (the icons show you how close you are to having enough resources to plan a ship/city upgrade). However, since the ships all attack automatically, your input is as simple as moving a cursor around and clicking on the hex where you want the ship to stop. The face buttons are used to activate upgrades and cards, and the shoulder buttons will let you optionally jump the camera around.

7. It briefly had a Platinum Trophy.

One of the patch updates added a Platinum Trophy, which Sony had said was forbidden on small-scale downloadable games. A further patch removed the Platinum.

8. The audio seems concentrated in one speaker.

For whatever reason, as soon as Age of Booty starts, the cheesy pirate music is mostly in the right-front speaker. There are no audio options to correct this.

9. The map maker is great.

If you want to make maps. It is very easy to forge your own board using all the tile types. Which, again, is very board game-esque. You have to dig to understand how the tiles interact which each other. Although they do not make it obvious when you are building your map, the interactions are rather clever. You'd think there would be an expansion pack for this, with new tile types.

10. During gameplay, the neutral ships and villages just pop in.

What's up with that? There's no graceful animate-in. They just POP on to the map. Villages should erect themselves on the tile, and I'm sure our disbelief could be suspended enough to allow those neutral merchant ships to somehow coalesce from thin air.