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Devil’s Maw also doesn’t work with Sac crew abilities. Sad I know 🙁
Back in the day, the most powerful combo in the game was to double pin by ramming a ship’s bow, using Le Bonaparte or another warship that could not be shot at from within S. This was made illegal for being too broken, but you can attempt the same thing today with a chainshot specialist.
I read @woelf’s old Asesino de la Nave review and it inspired me to buy it. I’ve long had her pirate version, the Santiago, and my most used ship may be France’s La Belle Etoile. But now I want to make a fleet dedicated to destroying cargo.
Panda (22 pts)
Havana Black
Calico Cat (SM)
Oarsman
Helmsman
Santiago (17 pts)
Captain
Helmsman
Rover (2 pts)
The Hag of Tortuga
Banshee’s Cry (3 pts)
Divers (1 point)
Dead Man’s Point
Simple enough strategy, I suppose. Very similar to how I use my La Belle Etoile fleets. Panda and Santiago head to an opponent’s HI. If they have time to stop at a wild island near it to load some gold, they can. Otherwise their job is to blockade the HI and intercept returning runners. Undercosted OP pirate boats do their thing, with Banshee’s Cry collecting the nearest island’s gold and Rover being our fort builder.
I just pulled La Victoire from a Crimson Coast pack. While she’s certainly a good ship and I don’t already own her, my pirate fleet is already stacked to the point where I’m not sure if I’ll use her as much as someone else might. So, I’ll offer her up as a trade piece for a week or two to you lovely people before I build her.
I’m mostly looking for Spanish Main rares, anything from Crimson Coast, and French ships of the line and forts. Though I’ll consider anything not Cursed or a Sea Monster from packs before Ocean’s Edge. These pieces I know off the top of my head I’d do a one for one trade for:
Harbinger (SM version)
Deliverance (CC)
Crimson Angel (CC)
Any French Fort
Havana Black
Nautilus (MI sub)
Le Superbe
Janissaries’ Blood
Nubian Prince
@Jack: Be prepared to make the keyword even cheaper then – Wizkids made it too expensive as-is, so your house rule would knock it down to 2 points maximum in my opinion.</p>
This was actually my attempt at justifying ghost ship’s cost haha. I figure ghost ship’s main weakness is ghostly ships can still be shot at normally.
“Ghostly” ships can shoot and be shot at, and can not ram or board.
Side note: I want to test a house rule making Ghostly ships unable to shoot, but being able to be shot at, except that you need to roll a 6 to hit.
According to the master rules sheet Hanno and Phrygias lacking the galley keyword is a mistake. AFAIK no ships with the galley look are not supposed to have the galley keyword, the way Carolina has a schooner design but no keyword.
I’m trying to find a doc that had an alternate boarding rule that I really liked. It was something along the lines of rolling one d6 for every mast and crew on a ship, then whoever had the lower combined roll eliminates a mast/crew, and it continues until one ship is derelict.
How do you guys scale games for different point totals? I usually play the standard 40 point game, but I have a couple of ideas for fleets that would need 50+ points to work.
I’m going to try this campaign soon with this addition to how gold is exchanged for new ships/crew, to try and prevent one faction from snowballing:
Between rounds, when adding new ships/crew to your fleet, the cost depends on how many points your fleet is currently worth. The gold-point ratio is whatever the tens number of your fleet’s current point value is.
0-9 points = free
10-19 = 1 gold
20-29 = 2 gold
And so on. So for example:
Let’s say the pirate player got their fleet hit pretty hard, and is down to 8 points. (Like perhaps Cat and Zephyr.) They also collected 30 gold. They could add the Raven’s Neck for 10 gold. (The first 2 points are free.) Their fleet is now worth 20 points so they need to spend 2 gold per point. Then with their remaining 20 gold they could do something like purchase the Darkhawk II.
I also managed to win an auction selling La Ville de Paris, Le Soleil Royale, Mademoiselle Josephine Godiva, and Vicomtesse Angelique Richelieu. My very strong French fleet grows stronger!
Managed to get my hands on four packs of Crimson Coast. For some reason I never collected very much from that pack, despite it containing a bunch of great ships and crew I’ve always wanted. Crossing my fingers for some beautiful French ships of the line or the Deliverance.
Any chance you’d sell the Amity?
I’m not actually sure if the Three Musketeer cards were ever officially released btw
Oh I forgot about ol Carbon Charlie. Always wanted to make use of him but always found his effect too slow.
I have such a poor Crimson Coast collection. Would love to get my hands on basically anything from that pack, but especially these:
Deliverance
Amity
Raven
Mermaid
Crimson Angel
Havana Black
Bloody Jake
Maurice Aristide
L’Hercule
L’Artesien
St. Pierre
Where in CC is Crew Protect worth 2 points?
It’s 3, sorry. CC Hawkins costs 6 points and has the 3 Pt SAT ability plus crew protect. By BC crew protect has gone down to 2. Commander Stephen Decatur is 7 points, and has crew protect as well as the 5 point extra action ability.
The bonus against a specific nation ability made a lot more sense when there were only three nations, but since then they mostly only seemed to exist for flavor purposes, or maybe to artificially inflate the cost of some other ability attached to it. They’d be a lot more useful if you could swap between them after seeing the opposing fleet, or even if the ability cost came down enough to pull one in with a recruiter.
Now that’s interesting. It would definitely make those crew who only give +1 against a single nation like Gunn the Elder a bit more playable. It also kind of makes thematic sense for these guys to be recruited in specific situations rather than people you start the game with.
🙁
I’m pretty sure I had the last review on the site. It was for the Snipe, my first ship and personal favorite.
I’ve had issues with campaign type games before with the player who takes an early gold lead running away with things, so I might have some tweaks to make. I forgot about the 3+ player rule getting rid of the majority gold requirement! That should probably stay and rounds should go until all the gold is brought to home islands or everyone passes. (Worried about a situation where there’s like only one or two coins left and whoever tries to take it will be immediately blown up by the other players.)
No custom ships here, my collection is large enough to keep this going through BC anyway. Putting defeated players back into the game with the next set’s signature nation is a good idea too. My crimson coast French fleet is usually pretty strong but I couldn’t think of a way to incorporate them into the game before.
Yeah I’m not too happy with Longshanks but love the rest. I really wanted to add Fantasma in this fleet for thematic purposes and Longshanks was the best fit of Spanish Main pirate ships that were low enough points for me to add without going over. Another captain would be better, objectively. What I might do is move Hag over to Venture (which gives an added bonus of her not being capturable) which allows an extra spot on LS for cargo. Bloody Jewel from Pirates of the Revolution would be perfect if I was allowing pack mixing, and I honestly still might do it since that ship matches the Fantasma aesthetic real well.
Not seeing a dedicated fleet thread, so I’m gonna post my latest fleet here and edit with how well it does in a few days after it gets played:
(Note, I have a habit for liking to not just stick to a single faction, but a single pack at a time if I can help it. This is mostly for aesthetic purposes as the designs of the ships usually look uniform. I also making fleets based around flavor text/lore as you’ll see.)
Fleet: (40/45 pts)
Snipe, 10 pts
– Captain Jack Hawkins
Zephyr, 8 pts
– Calico Cat (SM)
Venture, 7 pts
– Captain
El Chico, 8 pts
– Captain
Longshanks, 12 pts
– El Fantasma (SM)
– Helmsman
– The Hag of Tortuga (CC)
The Devil’s Maw
The idea is half aesthetic half strategic. I want a fleet that feels like a ragtag team of pirates instead of a couple super strong ones. Three of the four “main characters” of the franchise show up, with Jack and Cat captaining the ships that are supposed to be their first. I want this to be like the pirates first starting their careers.
The strategy is a bit based on surprise. At first it might look like a “mosquito” type fleet that tries to spread out and snipe the best coins from each island, but it’s actually quite aggressive. The fleet wants to hit the enemy on their way back from the islands, laden with treasure. Much like an actual pirate fleet! Zephyr/El Chico and Snipe/Venture will tag team attacks, with the sloops ramming target ships and taking out crew, with the brigs coming after to finish them off. (The Snipe may be able to handle a ship on her own if it’s a 2/3 master with all L guns.) I’m worried I’m wasting Longshanks’s potential in this fleet, but we’ll see. I think it will do really well against fleets composed of 2 moderately expensive ships, but El Acorazado looms.
Starting up my yearly summerly dive into this game, here’s my idea:
English, Spanish, and Pirate players. They start out only allowed to use Spanish Main ships and crew, plus forts and 0 point crew.
A normal 40 point game is played. When one fleet wins the round, either by getting a majority of the available coin or both other players pass, the winner takes the remaining coins on wild islands.
Any built forts remain in place. Players can now replenish their fleets by buying ships/crew (1 gold per point) from either the Spanish Main OR Crimson Coast sets. This basically represents time/technology progressing. (Long term this gives Spain a disadvantage, but they arguably start out with the strongest potential fleet, so that seems to fit historically speaking.)
Gold is distributed to the islands as normal and play resumes. The player with the lowest point total fleet goes first. After that round Revolution ships/crew are allowed, and so on and so forth.
Victory is achieved either through economy (100 gold on home island) supremacy (one player controlling 4 forts at the end of a round) or domination (only one player has a fleet, or the coin to purchase a new boat, at the end of a round.)
I’ve always been way more a collector. A couple friends played the game when I was younger but I moved and never found anyone else who played it. So honestly I think my proudest moment was when I bought the Spanish Main Snipe online. It was my favorite ship as a kid, and my little brother broke it when he was 2. I went through Spanish Main packs for years trying to pull it again unsuccessfully before seeing it on e-Bay about a decade later. She now sits at the head of my pirate fleet collection.
So I just had a random thought as for a house rule: I’ve always liked the ships that gain movement if they have all of their masts, and felt like that mechanic should have been used more in the game. So why not simply say that the component of a ship’s base move is the bonus it gets if undamaged? So S+S and S+L ships become S if hurt, and L+S and L+L ships become L. L movers can probably go to S if hurt, and S-base movers stay the same no matter how damaged. I might try a game like this. It brings variable speed into the game which I’m sure you know Ben would be a real world mechanic the game’s lacked. Ships don’t always go the same speed. There’s factors like wind and damage and whatnot.
Yeah, Nemo’s supposed to be very strong, like in the books. I think if team France and England don’t start out the scenario as allies then they’re doomed to lose. But even then he may well be unstoppable.
Working on a scenario to play when my copy of Captain Nemo arrives.
3 player game. One Mercenary, one English, and one French fleet.
Set up is standard for a 40 point game. However, the Mercenary player does not have a HI at all. Instead, they place their ship S-away from one of the wild islands, all of which are mysterious islands. The English and French player may build any 40 point fleet they like. However, the Mercenary player starts with this exact fleet:
Their one and only ship is the Nautilus.
On board is Captain Nemo, a Captain, a helmsman, and the UTs Nemo’s Plans, Nemo’s Charts, Screw Engine, Power Cannons, Mines, Metal Hull, Targeting Scope, and Periscope.
To the English and French fleets, eliminating a crew from the Nautilus yields coin equal to their point cost. Sinking the Nautilus gives 16 coins. They may need to work together in order to beat the Nautilus, but they’re still also competing against each other.
Not sure what else to add to top it off. I think that I am going to add one nerf to the Nautilus by making it forced to surface at least once every three or so turns in order to “refill its air tanks.”
I think turn order being variable would make the game way too luck-driven. What I do like is Ben’s “return fire” idea as well as wind. Return fire mitigates the advantage of going first (and probably getting the first shot) as there’s a simultaneous fire going on. And wind means that just because you’re going first doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to reach the islands first.
Don’t think you can double up on boards, but I might be wrong.
The main benefit is that you don’t get yourself pinned. Also, you can still shoot with every cannon while typically if you ram a ship you won’t be able to shoot every gun after. If you want to go full Gimmick and use Nemo or some other Capture ability it helps with that as well.
I was thinking SCS Gaule my b. But I do think that rank-3 L-range guns are better than a mix of S-range 2’s and 3’s simply because L-range guns can beat a ship with a canceller. You basically need Lenoir on board the other two in order to cancel other cancellers. And I’ve never found any boarding bonus to be very good other than the Capture ones. Boarding from S away is the best of those but if you could move shoot then board from S away it would be much better.
I’d rank the four of them as OE Gaule > L’Aube > SCS Gaule> Charlemagne
I’ll throw a curveball here and answer L’Aube.
L’Aube is 15 points, cheaper than Gaule and the same as Charlemagne. It’s slower, at L speed, but nothing a helmsman can’t fix. Crucially, L’Aube can be paired with Gentil de la Barbinais for an extra world-hater ability, making her guns 2-L against any non-French ship. It does only have 4 cargo spaces, but a much more useful effect and better guns than those two.
I also have to give my obligatory La Magnifique shoutout with its 6 cargo.
