Blog #20: Community goings-on, the best crew ever, and an aesthetic anniversary

No new changes to the site.  Hoping to do an extra blog post soon.  Future pages still in the beginning stages.

Occasionally I think I’ll feature other people’s content a bit, to spread the love and try to stimulate activity.  Here is some “news” from around the community:

• Godmason has a new rankings thread up.
• El_Cazador may be releasing up to THREE new custom sets at some point, the beginnings of which you can see here and here.
• Xerecs is working on his third custom set.
• Austin Larson uploaded some nice pictures of 10 masters on BoardGameGeek.
• OzymandiasWhite is making custom islands and posting them at the subreddit.

To top it all off, I should be about to begin a game with MegabyteKnight on VASSAL in a few minutes!  😀

 

Deal of the Day: Gone now, but you can check out eBay. This site contains affiliate links for which I may be compensated.

**Disclaimer: I will be using affiliate links with things like this, so if someone buys from it, I could make a few cents.  XD

 

Pirates CSG Card of the Day

Set number: 11 – Rise of the Fiends

Collector’s Number: 080 – Helmsman

2 points

This ship gets +S to her base move.

Game Piece Rating: 10/10.  Yup, I’m skipping straight to the rating today.  XD  There is no doubt that helmsmen are the best crew in the entire game.  For the most part, the most important attribute or stat in this game is SPEED.  You can almost never have enough of it, and most ships are without it when they are launched.  Helmsmen can give just about any ship a very needed speed boost.  Unlike the extremely useful Captain and Explorer crew, which are generally best on either gunships or treasure runners respectively, helmsmen are FANTASTIC and pretty much essential to BOTH.  Gunships need them to get the first shot and catch enemy ships.  Gold runners need them to be first to an island and to escape effectively.  When you get down to it, helmsmen are pretty much the backbone of any crew setup or fleet strategy.  Their only real competition comes from captains and cancellers.  Captains are a point more and not very useful to most gold runners, while cancellers are (usually) 5 points and not quite as flexible and downright useful in every game like helmsmen are.  The particular helmsman selected by the random number generator happens to be American, and they are a faction that could really use a speed boost since they have a lot of great gunships and some slowish gold runners.

Fast fleets are also a hallmark of competitive play.  If you’re trying to simply win at all costs, it’s quite likely that every ship in your fleet will have a helmsman, regardless of anything else.  A lot of the best fleets in the game are the fastest fleets in the game, and helmsmen are a big reason why.  One of the biggest mistake I see new players make is their lack of helmsmen.  They sometimes opt for cannoneers or shipwrights, which is understandable given their experience level.  However, it is important to learn how essential speed is to winning games.  If you’re crewing a ship, when in doubt, add a helmsman.  😀

You can find helmsman on eBay, or better yet, just print your own.  (should be formatted for printing, though no guarantees.  You can also switch out some of them for shipwrights/etc if you like.  Point costs directly on the chips help new players learn.  :))  A few of my games have become so large that I don’t have enough helmsmen in my relatively large collection to even play, so I have to rely on proxies.  If you just print your own generic crew, you don’t have to rely on opening packs or buying them.  It’s a great way to get started, and you can give them away to ensure new players aren’t at a disadvantage when they pull a smokepot specialist out of a pack instead of a helmsman.  🙂

 

Picture of the Day

Inevitably a focus on my Economy Edition game, which just started play 3 years ago today.

The Maui’s Fishhook (MF) uses her hoist arm to grab gold from the Arch:

The Americans illegally hired a submarine to be the first in the Lagoon: (check out the battle reports for details! XD)

The MF departs the big triple archway:

The Devil Ray surfaces, alone in paradise:

I love how the “sunlight” glinted off the MF’s shiny areas:

In this game, shiny silver was worth 3 times its printed value, with shiny gold at 2 times its printed value. (due to the shiny silver having more glitter on it XD)  These coins are found on the Silver Explorers from the Ocean’s Edge (gold) and Rise of the Fiends (silver) super rare packs.

 

It’s a Pirates’ Life for Me.

Ben