I can’t find anything in the normal rules or The Pirate Code that forbids a player from turning a crew face up (whether abandoned crew, or regular crew). I find it a little strange that crew cannot be revealed, because in general you may actually want to reveal a crew to an opponent to prove you’re not bluffing about someone you have assigned to a ship. (ex: you can tell them verbally and even pick up the chip and show it to them, but apparently you cannot keep the chip face up on the deckplate)
You must reveal (turn face up) a crew when using its ability, and it must remain face up the remainder of the game.
It doesn’t say you can’t reveal them when not using their abilities.
The rules do state to place them face down when first assigned, but there’s no mechanism or even mention of being able to flip them face up at will. It only provides that when using their abilities.
It’s been an established rule/ruling since almost the very beginning that you can’t flip them up any time you want, but I can add an extra clarifier into my notes to more explicitly state it somewhere.
Being able to flip crew at any time also creates issues with certain abilities, especially doctors.
If Rollando touched a native canoe that was carrying an abandoned crew and chose not to take it, would the abandoned crew be removed from the game because it cannot be face up on the canoe?
That would create one of those illegal situations that would have be resolved by ejecting the crew.
Since Rollando’s ability says “once per turn” (similar to things like the spyer abilities that can be used on any and every player’s turn), could he use his ability on an opponent’s turn? (ex: if a cancelled native canoe rammed his ship to board and steal a face down abandoned crew, then activate his ability to reveal the abandoned crew and force its removal from the game)
As long as ships are in contact, he can use his ability during another player’s turn.
In the Official Tournament Rules, it talks about a standard round being 30 minutes. Do you know if that was 30 minutes per player in a game, or 30 minutes for the entire game?
I assume it means total time. With standard 40-points builds and island/treasure setups, that should be enough to get through a 2-player game, as long as neither player is purposely delaying things or getting distracted too much. The actual time can run longer too, because of the equal number of turns allowance.
It’s interesting that the victory condition doesn’t include gold in forts.
I think that goes along with WK’s well-established habit of ignoring anything that wasn’t in the most recent set, especially after the Cursed Seas soft reboot. As far they were concerned, forts didn’t exist anymore.
Do you happen to know if the League format rules ever came out, or if you have them? (would be from 2008)
If they ever did come out, I didn’t save a copy. More than likely they were completely forgotten about and there wasn’t enough demand for that format for them to dig it back up. I’m pretty sure Mechwarrior and/or HeroClix did have league rules, so if you can find those, you might be able to adapt the overall format for Pirates.