This is an alternate way to conduct boardings which I’ve seen online as a house rule
Do you know who came up with it? Please include a link to the original source if possible.
– I’m not sure what to do with Inquisitor-type cards that eliminate all crew on a successful boarding. The doc I read didn’t offer any ideas. I think perhaps you could say they eliminate all crew with a successful roll, instead of just one at a time, but that’s really strong. I do like it though…
I do too because Massacre is overpriced (not usually worth 5 points) and lots of times you’ll only eliminate one or two extra crew (still powerful, but not likely to happen much in games).
The ram does no damage due to Leon’s ability. The Zephyr shoots and misses.
The shot would come first; order of operations is move-shoot-ram-board.
I like how the number of dice is tied to how many crew are actually on the ship. Of course an “empty” ship wouldn’t actually have nobody aboard, but the game doesn’t represent that very well with a single person normally taking up an entire cargo space by themselves.
The main issue I have is that thematically it’s a bit strange. If the other ship has already run out of crew, why bother chopping masts down from a ship you’re trying to capture? I think being able to eliminate all of a ship’s masts just from declaring a boarding party is too much, and makes very little sense historically. It’s hard to imagine the melee of a boarding party knocking down a full mast in most circumstances, especially intentionally by the boarders.
I do like that boarding can lead directly to capturing the ship, but a lot of captures (probably most) in the Age of Sail happened without the other ship getting dismasted first. I’ve been toying with the idea of a “super capture” boarding ability that lets you capture an enemy ship without making it derelict first, but it’s tough to do with making it extremely expensive and overpowered.
Only one boarding roll can occur per turn
What does that mean? You can only intentionally board one enemy ship per turn?
A ship which is being boarded can not move or shoot. The attacking ship may not shoot, but can move away (and call off the boarding) if they are not pinned.
When? If it’s your turn, the enemy wouldn’t be able to get actions anyway. Is the attacking ship not allowed to shoot due to cannon angles? It’s harder to pull off in Pirates, but plenty of boarding in the Age of Sail happened with ships broadside to each other, rather than a head-on ram. If a Galley wasn’t pinned but wasn’t interested in continuing the boarding rolls, moving away would require an extra action because a move action ends when you hit something. S-Boarding would make it more complicated.
I think there’s some potential here. I think it would be interesting to allow crewless ships to be captured regardless, which could incentivize people to put more crew on gold runners and make the game more combat/piracy oriented.