Kris Hall: Pirate Impressions

By pure coincidence, my family came into possession of two pirate games in the last three weeks.  Some days ago, my eldest daughter was given the game Pirateology as a belated birthday gift, and then my copy of GMT’s Blackbeard arrived this week.  Both games have a fine physical production, but both play very differently.

I can’t write an official review of Pirateology because no one in my family has managed to finish a game yet, and I doubt they ever will.  In Pirateology, the goal of the game is to eliminate all other players by driving them into bankruptcy.  In our first game, we played for one tedious hour without anyone coming near to driving anyone else out of the game.  My daughters’ bedtime became the welcome excuse to end our exercise in boredom.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  At it’s heart, Pirateology is a roll-and-move game.  Players move their pirate tokens—the game comes with five painted pirate tokens and five pirate ship tokens—on a series of paths that wind around a series of fictional islands.  Players can choose which way to move, and the biggest decision players face on most turns is which space to land on.  Some spaces give players cards, others give them a gold piece.  Some spaces contain penalties, but no one ever chooses to land on these. 

Some cards eventually let players attack other players, and wager gold pieces or cards on the outcome.  Both attacker and defender try to produce weapons cards to help them in their battle; a card with one weapon on it allows players to roll one combat die, a card with two weapons allows two combat dice, and a cannon card allows the use of three dice.  Highest total die roll wins the combat, and the wager.

Just to make the game longer and less interesting, the rules allow players to bury some of their treasure on the various islands if they land on the right space.  This keeps players with buried treasure from being eliminated from the game if they lose their gold in combat.  Other players must land by exact count on the treasure space and have a treasure map card in order to claim buried treasure.

Pirateology (from the Templar Company and Sababa Toys) comes with a fine set of toys, including plastic coins and a skull with a hole in the side of it to act as a storage bank for the coins.  But I doubt any real gamer will enjoy the interminable luck-driven game play.  I would rather walk the plank than play it again.

Blackbeard, the latest incarnation of the Richard Berg game that was first published by Avalon Hill many years ago, is a frigate of a different color.  This is a game of wargame-worthy detail that exhibits the designer’s research into the history of actual pirates as well as his experience with modern Euro-game mechanisms. 

In Blackbeard, players direct the fates of one or more historical pirates, and they occasionally also control King’s Commissioners, pirate-hunters that can be sent to chase and destroy the pirates of opposing players.  The goal of each player is to accumulate booty and notoriety, both of which can be converted into victory points.  The main way that pirates accumulate cash and infamy is by capturing and looting merchant ships, and attacking and sacking various ports.

GMT has given Blackbeard an impressively thick and sturdy game box, a colorful and attractive map, a fine set of cards with a moisture-resistant coating, two sets of player aids, and what seems like about 1000 cardboard tokens that represent everything from pirates and their enemies to the presence of scurvy or a drunken crew.

The actual game play is more complicated and fiddly than the average Euro-gamer is probably used to.  There are lots and lots of die rolls, and lots of die roll modifiers.  In the middle of our game on Wednesday night, Dave and I noticed Tom rolling a die for no apparent reason.  When questioned, Tom said that he assumed that whatever was happening in the game at that moment probably required a die roll.  It says something about Blackbeard that that seemed a perfectly reasonable explanation. 

The Appalachian Gamer reaction to Blackbeard was mixed.  We all appreciated the fine physical production of the game, and the attempt to simulate something based on history rather than Hollywood.  We are all willing—and perhaps eager—to try the game again.

But there was also a realization that much of the game play was repetitious.  Chasing and looting one merchant ship was much like chasing and looting another, and once a player is strong enough to sack one town, he can probably sack most of the rest.  A pirate with a high combat factor can be nearly invincible, and we ended our game after a couple of hours when it became clear that Tom had such a high notoriety rating that he was sure to win.  He achieved that high rating by fighting and destroying three King’s Commissioners that I foolishly sent against him.  There may have been strategies that could have hindered Tom’s progress, but an invincible pirate does not make for a suspenseful game.

In many adventure games (especially fantasy games) player abilities and the challenges they face both grow as the game progresses, but the growth of both is limited in Blackbeard.  Pirates can get a bigger ship on occasion, and can increase their combat factor with a heavy guns card, but that is about the extent of the improvement of pirate abilities.  Money can be used to buy a safe haven, but other than that it is just used to buy victory points.  It seemed odd to me that players couldn’t purchase a larger ship, bigger guns, or a better crew.  At the very least, I would have thought that players could speed up the refitting of their ships in port with cash, or reward their crews with gold to increase their loyalty.  Of course, such mechanisms would necessitate pirate opposition that grows stronger with the pirates themselves.  Maybe we will see some player variants that simulate this.

At the end of Wednesday night, Tom suggested that the best way to play Blackbeard was to get all the players drunk and make them play the game using silly pirate accents.  (That might be the best way to play every game from Apples to Apples to Zooloretto—but it seems especially apt for Blackbeard).  That suggests to me that Blackbeard is more of an experience game than a strategy game. 

I’m not passing any lasting judgments on Blackbeard until I’ve played it a few more times.  But even if I conclude it isn’t a perfect pirate game, it is still the pirate game I am most likely to choose if I was allowed to take one with me to a deserted island.

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