Merric Blackman
Australia
Waubra
Victoria
Ramping up my reviewing.
Happily playing games for many, many years.
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I must confess, I've become a bit of a Stefan Feld fan when it comes to boardgames. Notre Dame and In the Year of the Dragon are a couple of my favourite Eurogames, and I'm very fond of Roma as well. So, upon seeing Rum & Pirates in Mind Games on a recent trip to Melbourne, with the name "Stefan Feld" on the box, I quickly made sure to add it to my collection - completely passing by The Name of the Rose, which I hadn't researched and wasn't aware was another Feld design. Oops. Now I have to order it!
Upon my purchase (and that of A Touch of Evil: The Supernatural Game), I headed off to my brother's place, which was actually the purpose of my trip to Melbourne. Once there, and after admiring his new house, out came the games and Rum & Pirates was the first.
Let me say, it's not the best 2-player game, although it has its moments. I expect that I'll find it fascinating with 4 or 5 players, especially as the board gets filled with the various crews.
If you're not familiar with the game, the purpose is to pick up VP tiles (of various sorts) by moving through the alleyways of a town to the intersections. There's one Pirate Captain who everyone moves, but you leave your pirates in the alleyways as you move - so, a 4-length alleyway will leave four of your pirates in the streets (lying drunkenly?) As you only have 10 pirates to begin with, there's only a limited number of times you can move. It's actually quite a challenging game to end up in the best intersections whilst not giving good moves to your opponents!
It also uses dice, but by picking up Rum, you can have rerolls which is really important.
At the end of each turn, your remaining pirates return to the ship to wrangle over the bunk and hammock - the best places to sleep. This is determined by the die, but having more pirates and returning later to the ship give advantages here. With so much rolling, it's remarkably non-random.
Jeremy and I ended up tied for point in our first game, but he had more gold and won. We'd also played a lot of rules wrong, as I discovered on my way back home in the train as I properly read the rules: I'd used too many sleeping tiles, you need matching treasure maps to score them, and only the best pirate items score. Oops.
Only one thing for it: play the game again. So, on Friday afternoon I brought it out and played a 3-player game at Good Games Ballarat.
3 players (and knowing the rules) was a lot better. Liam and Jesse were my opponents, and I proved myself to be the better leader of a gang of pirates than either of them, although my score wasn't that much better than their's. Jesse was the recipient of a large number of scorpion stings from the treasure: Liam would keep using his rum to mean that whatever Jesse rolled, he'd get the scorpions. We didn't do that much carousing in the pubs, but I picked up a few treasure maps and Jesse made sure the Pirate Captain had a good love-life and also the right equipment - patch, pegleg, that sort of thing. No parrot, though. What self-respecting pirate doesn't have a parrot?!
It's a quick game with 3 players; taking us about 50 minutes including the rules explanation. Where I won it was in the sleeping wrangles; I'd often pick up the best bed, and there were times when the others didn't even compete! Jesse also proved that, even with Rum, there were times the die hated him.
I'll look forward to bringing out this game at our next boardgame day. It's a lighter game than the other Feld Alea designs, but still quite elegant and enjoyable.
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Ramping up my reviewing.
