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What is the most complicated rules situation you have encountered in a game?
I have many – Abandoned Crew, UT resolution, etc. Abandoned Crew can be about as confusing as it gets in my opinion. I’ve noticed that UT’s can slow a game to a crawl between looking up the specific text and trying to resolve UT issues with other UT’s and abilities. I don’t generally bother using Holy Water and Davy Jones’ Heart because it’s not worth the headache. Combining native canoes, abandoned crew, and Holy Water all in the same game is a recipe for disaster. Maybe only use all of those at once if you’re playing Woelf. 😉
I also remember some weirdness with treasure trading Wolves from VASSAL Tournament #1. I think that situation is why this got added to the latest Pirate Code:
-If a ship has the ability to trade treasure from one island to another, it cannot target treasure on an island where Wolves has been revealed because that ability requires the traded treasure to be loaded, which Wolves prevents. If Wolves has not been revealed, even if one or more players know it is there (due to other abilities), the island may be targeted for the swap normally.
Ransom also became a big issue in the VASSAL tournaments in regards to when you could or could not purposely eliminate the 0LR crew to keep something more valuable aboard.
Hidden Cove can actually be very confusing and using it fundamentally changes the way the game is played on a huge level.
The whole “explorer swap to take an extra coin and dump the explorer” loophole has always annoyed me, and I think it should be specifically ruled out because it’s quite confusing and feels like cheating.
It can also be very confusing to figure out what you can and can’t do with an enemy ship when you “take possession” via All-Powerful or Altar of the Loa.
Trying to resolve a massive haul from Pandora’s Box and not have conflicts due to the order can take a long time, as I’ve found out in The Hourly Campaign. XD
This epic game had some gaffes on my end involving capturing and Barbary Banner, and I elaborate in the summary at the end.
I’m still not sure I know how to use Hoist 100% correctly because all three of the abilities it has seem to overlap or be borderline identical. Kraken is a bit of a disaster – can’t submerge, chaining, Captain Davy Jones “lock-on” weirdness, ships that don’t fit, and surrounding submerged submarines that stay submerged. Whew! XD Also, Marines shooting when on a submerged ship.
CG1 had some complex turns – the turn from 5/8/2016 (can search that in the BR) was especially tough to play through. 8 cancellers in one area, with exactly 4 per side. O_O XD That BR has some of my longest-ever captions for the pictures, and not because there weren’t many pictures for the game – it just took so long to explain what was happening! Although I suppose a lot of my complex turns were more concerned with gameplay than actual rules hangups.
It was more with fleet setup, but this Cristal del Obispo setup was hard to figure out, as I explain the description.
Chieftains and canoes get weird, especially in campaign games and/or with multiple sets and nationalities involved.
The specifics of whirlpool towing and towing in general (especially with Titans and trying to throw things into and out of fog banks) can get pretty wild too.
I can’t think of anything too complicated that actually came up in a game, but maybe it just seemed like not a big deal at the time or was easy enough to see coming so it could be avoided.
Way back when I’d created a set of rules challenges where there was some odd combination of pieces, and people had to figure out how the interaction worked. They’re probably lost to history at this point, although I might still have them buried in a text file somewhere…
Ransom also became a big issue in the VASSAL tournaments in regards to when you could or could not purposely eliminate the 0LR crew to keep something more valuable aboard
As long as it wasn’t on one of the original owner’s ships, the “cannot be eliminated” ability would be shut down, so it could technically be eliminated by things that targeted crew or cargo. The 0-point crew rule would still apply, so you wouldn’t be able to unload them anywhere but at home.
Hidden Cove can actually be very confusing and using it fundamentally changes the way the game is played on a huge level.
Honestly, Hidden Cove is just broken as written. I really wish they’d kept the original (pre-release) version that sent you to an island you’d already explored.
The whole “explorer swap to take an extra coin and dump the explorer” loophole has always annoyed me, and I think it should be specifically ruled out because it’s quite confusing and feels like cheating.
Separating crew transfers and non-crew cargo transfers into discrete parts of an explore action could maybe help, but that’s adding a bunch of complexity just to stop something that’s mostly just annoying, and not really game-breaking despite being a weird loophole.
This epic game had some gaffes on my end involving capturing and Barbary Banner, and I elaborate in the summary at the end.
Even though most of the time the Banners just get dumped for the quick fixed value, the mast elimination gets into the always ugly need for tracking, and that almost never ends well. I love the thematic idea of them, but they can be a lot more trouble than they’re worth.
I’m still not sure I know how to use Hoist 100% correctly because all three of the abilities it has seem to overlap or be borderline identical.
That goes back to the early phases of design, where the lead designer (I think it was still Mike at the time, but maybe Kelly) asked me for some ideas on what the Hoist could do. I suggested all three of those, thinking they’d pick just one, but they ended up going with all of them. The first two largely overlap – the first can be applied when using the second, but it’s also usable when exploring with a full action or an Explorer-generated one. The third ability is its own thing entirely, and doesn’t interact with the other two at all. It’s mostly just a nice bonus when making a return trip somewhere, or when following up after another ship did the initial exploring.
Way back when I’d created a set of rules challenges where there was some odd combination of pieces, and people had to figure out how the interaction worked. They’re probably lost to history at this point, although I might still have them buried in a text file somewhere…
I remember coming across some of those and being absolutely baffled. XD The Internet Archive seems to have a decent amount of random MT pages, but it would be hard to find without a link from another page or the exact URL.
As long as it wasn’t on one of the original owner’s ships
That’s the thing- it almost always was. I think the main one was trying to dump the 0LR +5 crew in whirlpools so you didn’t lose something more valuable, which of course would have just made them more OP if you can just “sac” them in some way. I think it just got a little frustrating that you couldn’t kill off the one member of the crew who wasn’t providing any immediate value.
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