Wano Country spans 16 volumes, encompassing 149 chapters and a staggering 191 episodes. This arc of Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece will soon be playable on your tabletop courtesy of publisher KessCo with its upcoming One Piece: Dawn of Liberation board game, which just launched over on Kickstarter.
Designed by Alex Kessler, this cooperative adventure board game will put you and your friends in the hats of the Straw Hat crew themselves as you struggle against the forces of the Beast Pirates to liberate the land of Wano, culminating in a final raid on Onigashima and the fearsome Kaido. I had the opportunity to check out a prototype copy of Dawn of Liberation in preparation for the campaign’s launch. As someone who has played previous KessCo board games, I can attest that this latest treasure looks to deliver the deepest and most intricate game in their catalog yet.
Taking place across three acts that follow the storyline from the source material, the game has each player build a team of their favorite One Piece characters, composed of a designated captain and supporting crew. You then work to complete missions, recruit allies, and do what they can to prepare for the final assault on Kaido. The core of Liberation is to manage the growing threat of Kaido and his pirates while gathering your resources and taking out bosses before the final raid on the Beast Pirate’s fortress. Rounds are composed of a pretty standard three phase setup: The enemy phase, player phase, and the end phase.
Starting the round off are Kaido and the pirates as you roll dice to spawn new pirates across the regions of Wano. Some boss effects will trigger, and you’ll roll a special Kaido dice that determines what action the big bad will take, which can range from adding another boss to the board to no action at all. Its a bit of chaos that keeps you on your toes, recquiring you to adapt as you go.
Player turns are fairly straightforward and easy to learn. You place each captain and crew member of your team on an action space, perform said action, and then (if you wish) move your captains a space. The actions themselves are as straightforward as the plank those evil Beast Pirates want you to walk on, including dealing damage to a boss or enemy pirates, pulling new items or allies (or a dangerous Smile Fruit that will hurt you) from the included blind bag, gaining food and weapon resources, recruiting friendly samurai units, or completing that region’s specific mission. Players can take turns in any order, which gives Liberation a solid boost in the strategy department, allowing for setups with potentially big swing payoffs that can turn the tide. Some aspects remind me of Z-Man’s Pandemic series of games, which I happen to adore.
Dropping in some added One Piece flair to the mix, each character you are able to recruit to your merry band of Straw Hats features special abilities, stats, and even upgraded forms that really help sell the One Piece goodness. Zoro, master of Santoryu, for instance, whenever he is carrying three weapons in his inventory, can reroll up to three dice when taking your captain’s action. Usopp and his trusty slingshot can take out pirates and damage bosses from a distance. Between the 12 starting characters you can pick from, along with the extra characters that can be recruited during the game, and the bonus characters unlocked after completing the game for the first time, much of Liberation’s replayability comes from this mixing and matching of captains and crew and figuring out how to win.
Alongside the playable characters, the bosses of the Tobi Roppo are equally as distinct and fearsome. Each of the 25 potential bosses (some of which are locked for subsequent playthroughs and through special summoning means) pose dangerous risks to players whenever they arrive on the field. Some, such as Basil Hawkins, require special conditions to be fulfiled in order to fight and do damage to them, while others, including Perospero, apply a global effect requiring players to spend a food resource to move.
For each turn that these bosses remain on the field, the people of Wano lose Joy, a unique resource that bestows boons or debuffs to the players depending on the value. Should this value reach zero, a truly terrifying boss will appear. This Joy value will also decrease for each undealt-with pirate unit on the board at the end of a round that isn’t blocked by a recruited samurai unit. Balancing this Joy track along with preparing for the final raid and end game gauntlet is a real challenge.
And speaking of the raid… Where Dawn of Liberation has really set itself apart for me is in the big final third act, the Onigashima Raid. Everything the players have done up until this point goes toward improving your odds of success in this one assault. The board flips to reveal the Beast Pirates’ base, Onigashima, with not only Kaido himself looming large at the top, but also four incredibly tough bosses that you can opt to try and take down, greatly weakening the menacing boss at the end. Each of the bosses you manage to take out in the previous acts earns you additional turns to try and clinch the fight. Managing to keep the people of Wano safe enough even grants Luffy the hype-inducing Gear 5 form for this final fight. Even for folks who haven’t watched One Piece, this sort of culmination and payoff of your plans is hype af.
The version I played of Dawn of Liberation was a prototype, so any concerns I have may be addressed by the time the final product arrives. That said, my one mild criticism lies in just how replayable this box will be when the final version sails to backers. The quests, the key to progressing through the game, are always the same, with the only change being in what region some of them appear (a couple are always in the same place). I would love to see additional story missions and quests being thrown into the chum bucket to let you pick from randomly, to help make each playthrough feel more unique. To KessCo’s credit, though, Dawn of Liberation does include a more challenging Emperor+ mode and additional tweaks to change things up, such as drafting your characters and other gameplay adjustments to keep things exciting.
Now, admittedly, my One Piece knowledge is pretty basic at best. I know my Luffys from my Aces, and that Devil Fruits give the eater unique abilities based on the variety the person eats, but before playing Liberation, I had no reference to who or what the Red Scabbards were. This is all to say that I am viewing this adaptation through the lens of how it is from a board game perspective, so I can’t comment much on how well it follows the Wano Country Arc, but I will say that, from the bit I’ve played, it has set Dawn of Liberation up as a solid resource and threat management puzzle.
The Kickstarter campaign is set to last from March 3 until April 2, 2026. Unlike campaigns that go to crowdfunding to secure funding to create the game, One Piece: Dawn of Liberation is already complete, and the team is instead using this more as a pre-order system, with the games currently planned to arrive on doorsteps in Q4 of 2026.
For fans of One Piece who may not be deep into the board gaming hobby, despite One Piece: Dawn of Liberation being the most complex offering by KessCo so far, it still manages to keep the overall package at what I think is an approachable level if you have experience with games as complex as, say, Pandemic or Betrayal at House on the Hill.
One Piece: Dawn of Liberation marks a brand new way to experience the biggest arc of one of the most successful anime and manga of all time, and regardless of if you are a fan of the Straw Hats or just looking for a fun new game to add to your board game shelf, you should check out the Kickstarter and take a bite out of this board gomu-gomu fruit.
Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.
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