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Meant to post my latest battle report video here, but I forgot. Some of you have already checked it out so thanks for that!
I think I tend to see most people overrating a lot of ships so thinking of underrated ones is quite difficult.
I’m not sure if they’re underrated, but I’ve been growing more attached to Galleys recently. Having a pseudo-Oarsman on them is pretty nice as it often forces your opponent to expend extra time to finishing off a mastless Galley. In some cases it’s still better to just have the Oarsman, but it’s nice as a built-in feature.
Sometimes getting line of sight with their mast arrangement can be a little difficult, but I find that the stern turn often helps with this and is also generally quite useful. Not being able to take out masts when ramming is a bit of a downside though.
My confusion arose from the codes wording for duplicate UTs. “The no-duplicates rule applies to unique treasures only during setup, when placing them in the treasure pool.” This made me think that the treasure pool is where they had to be unique. Thought I’d just verify it here, thanks again.
For Unique Treasures does the No Duplicates rule apply per player or for the treasure pool for the particular game? I.e. can you have multiple copies of a UT in the same game if different players bring them?
If a ship with the “Two hits from the same shoot action are required to eliminate one of this ship’s masts.” ability is hit by something with “Once per turn when this ship hits an enemy ship, also eliminate one crew from that ship.” does it still eliminate a crew if it only scores one successful hit, so not causing a mast to be lost?
Likewise, would something like La Belle Etoile still cause a ship with “Two hits from the same shoot action are required to eliminate one of this ship’s masts.” to still lose something on every successful hit regardless of how many masts are actually eliminated?
Nice! I think Antelope could be 4 points, and the Privateers likely 4 as well.
I think he’s put the Antelope at 6 points so it can use both crew.
For me 2022 marks my first year of getting back into Pirates CSG after having more or less forgotten about it for about a decade so the year has been one full of discovery. At the beginning of the year I thought the game was literally just a Pirates of the Caribbean game, as I talked about in the self-introduction thread, so I’ve had a lot to get my teeth into after learning much more about it.
After buying myself a box of Pirates of the Revolution early in the year and some trades with yourself, I’ve expanded my collection beyond the eternal battle of English vs Pirates from PotC and finally had a chance to play with the other major factions of which I’ve probably grown to like the French the most.
My favourite fleet I’ve played this year is probably the one I used in the last game I played, which was a French/English mix of Le Superbe, Le Favori, HMS Oxford and Edinburgh Trader. This was in a roughly 70 point game using my pools format that I’m hoping to make another Battle Report video for in the next couple of weeks.
My favourite fleet using the regular fleet building rules was probably a 40 point English fleet of PotC ships that I played much earlier in the year before getting hold of ships from other sets. This consisted of one of my favourite ships, the HMS Hyena, as well as the HMS Victor and Edinburgh Trader again. I think 3 master ships are my favourite to play with as there are so many different options with a lot of versatility and this fleet I feel encompasses that.
My favourite picture is this one from the 4 player game I made a battle report video for, where the United States derelicts the Cursed Blade and was quite pivotal in that it basically put my brother out of the running to win the game.
In the video I talked about how the Cursed Blade only just doesn’t reach her home island to drop off treasure. What I didn’t mention was that at the time we couldn’t figure out how she’d reached the wild island in two turns, but somehow hadn’t gotten back in two turns. This turned into a lengthy discussion into whether or not my brother had accidently cheated and got confused between the speeds of two of his ships.
None of us thought he had intentionally cheated, but we couldn’t figure out how it had happened until I went back through the notes I was making for the video to try and reverse engineer how we’d got to the position and everything became clear when I then remembered that Cannibals had eaten the ship’s Helmsman. It ended up being quite a funny though confusing moment which just goes to show how hard it can sometimes be to keep track of everything in games with more players.
This then ties in with my “Event” of the year, which was playing this 4 player game and making it into the video for the Holiday Booty Giveaway contest. It was my first time playing with 4 players as well as introducing several new people to the game. Making the video was also a lot of fun and I’ve got a couple more in the works.
My favourite game of the year is actually a 60 point game I played with another of my brothers where I was playing a Pirate fleet up against his French fleet. I don’t have any photos from that game, but I do remember it being quite a cagey affair as there was quite a lot of firepower in play and neither of us wanted to expose ourselves to being shot at first. Le Bon Marin and Bloody Jewel were grabbing any safe treasure they could find without getting involved with any bigger ships.
The game reached a point where I was trying to bring a treasure filled Black Pearl 025 and Neptune’s Hoard back to my home island whilst being chased down by a combination of Le Superbe and Le Triton with Le Soleil Royal only a turn or two behind them. Without a clear path back to my home island I was forced into a poor engagement before the Soleil Royal could make it a 3v2, where I couldn’t quite get all my cannons into range and ended up losing both ships and the game.
I also had the Black Swan in my fleet, but had only crewed her with a Captain which the Le Soleil Royal had eliminated with her ability. I think the Black Swan had only lost a mast or 2, but without a Captain it almost felt like I’d lost the entire ship. This game gave me a much greater appreciation for using Oarsman as a defensive tool on ships, which I now use a lot more regularly.
If you hit a ship with a Switchblade, but then move away so that you are no longer touching the hit ship can boarding still occur or does the blade have to remain in contact?
Finally managed to finish my 4 player battle report video. Ended up taking quite a bit of time to put together and I was quite busy during the week, but I made it! This one is quite lengthy, but hopefully you still enjoy.
Thought I’d have a go at doing something a bit different with a video battle report. It’s just for a very small game I played by myself, but I’m hoping to get a video finished for a slightly larger 4 player game I played yesterday.
Ah yes, the “turn them over – they’re yours!”
Thanks for the clarifications, I’ve always played that a player reveals when they have more than half the gold at their island.
How does “This ship may dock at an enemy home island and load one treasure. If able, she must leave on your next turn.” work? Do you get to choose the treasure you take or is it random?
Also when trying to find an answer in the FAQ I came across the section for “Multiplayer”, which has among its exceptions from the regular 2-player rules that “Treasure is not revealed when unloaded at a home island.” This implies that you are supposed to reveal unloaded treasure in a 2-player game, which seemed odd to me as this isn’t actually mentioned anywhere in the rules. The rules just state that all treasure must be unloaded when you dock at your home island.
I’ve been playing that the treasure always stays hidden as it’s hidden when on the ship so it felt logical that it remained hidden when unloaded. Why is it the case that it should be revealed?
Going back to my original question, it would seem the answer would be that you do get to choose as you’d be able to see the treasure anyway. Would this then also mean that in a multiplayer game you would get to look at all of your opponent’s treasure to then choose which one you want to steal?
Probably a difference in perspective, but I think fairness is less important at the competitive level, because competition inherently means trying to gain some kind of advantage (whether fair or not) over the opposition.
From a different angle, I see your point in terms of making a competitive environment fair for a lot of people, especially newer players or people who have small collections lacking competitive game pieces.
When I say “fair” I don’t necessarily mean that any average player should be able to rock up with any fleet and expect to win a properly competitive game, I more mean that fleets shouldn’t be able to win a game before an opponent even has a realistic chance to respond. In my opinion, a lot of the game should be decided on the table and players have a chance to display their skill at commanding their fleet. The power level of certain combinations and fleets seem so fast that this doesn’t look to be as much of a factor as I would prefer it be from my own rookie perspective.
Obviously I don’t mean to say that these fleets take no skill, but a slower paced game will always give you more decision making and chances to outplay your opponent which in turn makes you feel like your choices have more of an impact on the game.
Building your fleet should definitely still be an important factor, but with the poor balance of certain ships, crew and abilities it feels like the pool of realistically viable ships is somewhat limited if you actually want to keep on par with the power level of the best combos in the game.
In the original set, the standard fleet size was only 30!
Wow, I didn’t know about this! Makes ships like El Garante feel even more strange.
That’s not even an opinion – that’s exactly what really happened.
Well there we go then. The work on the FAQ has definitely done a lot to tighten up many of the loose ends, but I think it would take quite a lot of work to make the game “fair” at this point in a competitive sense.
To sort of respond to your post as whole, I think the more I play the game the more it seems obvious to me that the game isn’t really balanced at all and a lot of rules and game pieces weren’t play tested as much as they probably should have been.
There are several things such as even the 40 points fleet limit that leave me wondering what the original idea was for how they thought the game would be played. Did they want fleets with only 2 ships? Did they think people wouldn’t use crew as much? Did they mean for players to be able to stack loads of Unique Treasures and only have a few actual treasure coins?
Because of these things I don’t really see the game as being competitive and only really play for fun as despite its flaws I do still think the game is enjoyable at a base level. I mostly play with my brothers who would definitely find things like UPS not fun to play with or against and as such I’ll avoid building fleets with ships or crew that might be considered questionable or too strong.
I think when it comes to disputes with fleets and rules the problem is that the only ruleset we have is the original rules of the game, which in my honest opinion aren’t really up to par and could use a large overhaul. In this sense I agree that there should be some sort of different “game modes” to the original game, but then who decides what these are and would people want to go out of their way to learn and follow them?
For example, I personally avoid ships or crew that give extra actions as I think they make certain ships capable of doing too many things before your opponent has a chance to respond. Most of these abilities are also on a die roll, which can lead to lucky streaks that can almost auto-win a game. For a lot of people extra actions are a key part to the game though so probably wouldn’t agree with me if I said I wanted them gone.
Another problem is that the community for the game isn’t very big so it’s not actually too easy to find people to play the game with. This means that for people that want to get involved in playing the game, but don’t have as much experience/knowledge or as big of a collection they can turn up and just get stomped by people playing higher level strategies as the gap between casual and competitive in this game is massive.
I think for me, if people want to play ultra competitive and use all the high end strategies these people need to create a space for themselves to play at this level (maybe an online league on VASSAL or TTS) and learn to give some leeway to players that just want to enjoy the game with fellow players at a meet-up.
In my opinion, I think that the game wasn’t really ever designed to be played super competitively and as more sets were added unintended combinations, stacking effects and abilities crept in unmonitored that lead to certain things being at a power level way higher than was expected, which is why I personally avoid some of these things.
I’ve thought about making a rules set basically from the ground up and also making fleet lists for each of the factions that would be somewhat similar to the army codices that you see in Warhammer 40k, but I don’t really play the game enough to justify spending the time to do this. I do think that something of this sort will probably be necessary if people want a fair and competitive version of the game though.
I’m not too sure what to say on resolving unfinished games as I’ve never had this problem personally, but I only ever play games with 2 or 3 players and usually max out at 60 point fleets.
For ships like Fantasia and Hannah that have the ability “Friendly ships within S of this ship get +1 to their cannon rolls.”, can this also apply to the ship with the ability itself?
Thanks for the rundown Woelf.
What you talk about happening with FotG is basically what I thought would have ended up happening after reading through the events, so no surprises to me there.
I think Divers and Raft seem like the most fair events though they don’t really feel like “events” per se. They feel like they should be something like equipment with a one time effect.
Events in my mind would have been something like if Becalmed globally dropped the max movement to L for a turn for both players or something along those lines or maybe some sort of card that gave -1 to cannon rolls for both players for a turn, like “sea mist”.
In any case it does seem like a bit of a missed opportunity and I’ll probably just avoid using them for simplicity’s sake.
Yeah that makes sense. Those two cards in particular do seem a bit too strong for their cost.
Are there any events that you’ve used before that you feel have added to the game at all or do you think events are just a badly done mechanic in general?
Is there a ruling that states this is the case? It seems logical that you wouldn’t be able to, but I can’t find anything in the code that specifically states that you can’t.
Hey Ben, I have spares of all the PotC pieces you need, but the ships have been built and the Black Pearl only has the deck plate remaining from its cards. The Kraken Gong card has also had the empty treasure slots part of the card cut off to just keep the rules section. The Cursed Captain Jack is still as its original card though. They have some very light wear from how they’ve been stored, but are otherwise in good condition.
I’m assuming you’re probably wanting them for collection purposes so this might not be what you’re looking for, but I thought I’d put a post in case you were just wanting them for actual play.
Is it correct that a Musketeer shot can benefit from the “This ship eliminates two masts with one hit.” ability?
The code entry says “This ability applies to all additional cannons provided to the ship by abilities, unless specified otherwise.” and doesn’t seem to contradict anything in the Musketeer’s wording, but I just wanted to clarify. Thanks.
Hi there, I’m a pirates player from the UK. I’d been playing Warhammer 40k over the Christmas holidays, that I tend to do as a sort of yearly tradition with my brothers. The problem I find with Warhammer is that it can be a bit unwieldy with a lot to learn and remember, and can take a while to set-up and play so I found myself thinking it’d be good if there was a simpler game with similar ideas. That’s when I remembered the Pirates CSG and after some google searches ended up finding this site!
I think I first played the game some time around 2010 or 2011 when my older brother came across a box of the Pirates of the Caribbean set that was on clearance sale from a stationary store. He bought a couple of packs before we then decided to go back and grab as many as we could. In the end we managed to get our hands on about a box and a half at the price of 50p a pack (about $0.75 at the time). An absolute bargain we were lucky to get. Because of this we’ve basically been sat on a complete set ever since, only missing the special edition ships.
Until looking into the game recently we literally thought the game was just a Pirates of the Caribbean game, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this wasn’t the case and there was actually much more to it. We also didn’t know that generic crew were even a thing, as these weren’t released in the Caribbean set other than a few of the movie characters as stand ins and basically nothing for the English faction. We’ve spent about 10 years thinking Maccus is the best crew in the game.
I recently invested in a box of the Pirates of the Revolution set that seemed like the cheapest way (and maybe best way for good ships) to expand our collection and get back into the game. Didn’t quite get all the ships I wanted missing the Bonhomme Richard and Star of Siam, but got pretty much everything else. The site and all the information here has been hugely helpful in learning more about the game, so I just wanted to say thanks for all the effort you’ve put into it.
