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2 points is fine for UT Hoard. I like it a lot, and it can be very powerful in the right situations, but 4 is a little high for general use – especially in standard games where there will be few UTs, and even fewer worth stealing.
Sounds like it’s been mostly covered, but for terrain in general, the exact size or look isn’t critical at all. You can take any piece of paper that’s roughly the size of an island with the name written on it. The only ones that need anything extra are the fog banks and icebergs, which need six evenly-spaced points around the outside numbered 1-6.
Size doesn’t actually matter, and often they can be more fun if they’re significantly larger than islands. Then they become much more of an obstacle, and not something that can be mostly easily avoided.
Blackfoot Bill
Pirate
2 points
Ability: When this ship is damaged, remove any crew member, except this one, instead of a mast.Would this apply to fire masts? I would think not, because the intent behind “remove” is more similar to “eliminate” than “replace”.
It was from before firemasts existed, so I think it would have been intended to work only on full removals, like from a standard cannon hit or a ram – not replacement.
My question concerns using the unreleased Fort St. Phillip (in a draft of Revolution) in conjunction with native canoes. (now that I think about it, El Puerto Blanco has the same ability)
Fort St. Phillip
4 gold
3S-3S-3S-3L-3L-3L
A ship docked here may use its action to look at one face-down cargo on each island.Do all of the canoes sacrifice their action at once in order to use the ability regardless of how many are docked there? Or does it only require one canoe? Do they all have to be docked there at once? If it only requires one, can the other canoes be given their (same) actions normally? If 5 canoes are docked at the fort, can you use the ability 5 times?
Each canoe counts as an individual ship so if all five were docked you could use it five times.
The “same action” requirement applies, so if one does it, then that’s the only action available to the others. Any that weren’t docked there would have to sit doing nothing.
I can’t recall ever seeing one labeled as a “Promotion Edition”, but then again I never really paid much attention to that.
Spanish Main did have a set of “Ghost Ships”, but I’m pretty sure they were never distributed in packs like this, plus there were a lot more of them than what would fit in a single pack.
It’s possible this is one of the Euro/UK versions with the alternate starter rules, but those were usually packaged the same as normal packs, not as promos. The non-standard logos as you pointed out are odd too.
Unless one of the crazy collectors like Old_Man knows, the only way to find out what’s going on may be to open it.
Without question, the “collectibility”.
Everyone loves pulling something rare or cool from the random packs, but once you’re past the first dozen or so packs from any given set, you hit diminishing returns very quickly. You’re less and less likely to find something new, and increasingly likely to get duplicates of what you already have.
It would add a lot to the start-up cost of playing the game, but I think it would be a lot better to have fixed sets of cards. They could be set up with a handful of ships and crew for each faction, so multiple people could play with a single set, or they could be in sets where you get a whole bunch of stuff for a single faction, so you’d need a different one for each player (unless you wanted to do single-faction “civil war” battles).
You’d lose a lot of the sheer quantity because there wouldn’t be set after set of “filler” ships that are generally inferior to others that already exist (and/or appear in the same set), but having less in the game would allow for what is there to be balanced and tested much more, and much better.
You have to give WK a lot of credit for attempting that sort of non-random model with games like Crimson Skies, even though it obviously had a negative impact on the profitability of the game. Getting people to keep buying the same stuff over and over again is the bread & butter of the collectible market, and from what I’ve heard from numerous other sources, it’s also the primary market that keeps brick & mortar gaming stores afloat.
Almost all of these “changes” are things covered by specific abilities.
In a much more streamlined version of the game, it would make sense for most of those to always be available as parts of the standard actions. You’d lose a big chunk of the strategy in selecting crew for your ships, but it would make things a lot simpler, and would allow you to put much more focus on the unique(-ish) abilities of named crew.
–Repeating Guns: When this ship is given a shoot action, you may declare that she is using repeating guns. If all cannons hit during that shoot action, each cannon may shoot again. (This action does not count towards the two action limit) For each cannon that misses on its second shot, eliminate one mast or cargo from this ship.
This is more like what Broadsides Attack should have been.
Maybe not extra shots with the entire set of cannons, but one or two would have worked well.The way this functions and is worded, I don’t think it would need to be declared at the start of the shoot action, unless you made the extra rolls mandatory when the entire initial set hit. The “each cannon may” means you could cancel the extra shots if you didn’t want/need them after seeing if everything hit. That’s functionally the same as rolling normally, then deciding if you want the extra shots only if everything hits.
If a native canoe finds the Marines UT, does it leave the game or stay on the island?
It just removes itself without doing anything to the canoe.
Neptune’s Trident – does it affect ships docked at HI’s? Can you measure the S width S away from the ship and protruding at a perpendicular angle? (I may need to show diagram/picture)
Yes. It is a shoot action, but the HI isn’t the target so the shooting restriction doesn’t protect it.
Some part of the S edge has to touch your ship, but beyond that, the angle is pretty flexible.
Can you activate Ghost Ship while in a fog bank to choose your exit location or simply start moving the ship from its heading within the fog bank as if the fog bank wasn’t there?
You can activate GS, but you still have to roll normally for the exit to establish your location.
Silly: Can you ignore a ship’s stern flag for moving purposes since it’s not a solid object? (or must ram)
It’s part of the ship, so you can’t ignore it.
If a Black Mark crew is captured by Dragon Eyes, can the Cursed crew on the now-Spanish ship not use their abilities? (or does Black Mark turn the ship Cursed for the whole game)
The ship reverts back if the BM crew leaves, so Cursed crew would stop working unless you had something else to allow them.
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.
Becoming the RA is an obvious one for me, although I’d have to say the biggest actual accomplishment was writing up a 50+ page FAQ pretty much from scratch, and then expanding and updating it for years afterwards.
I couldn’t even begin to calculate the amount of time that went into it, and it’s not a project I’d ever want to even think about doing again, but it was well worth the effort.
If the “Crew of any nationality may use their abilities on this ship” ability is 3 points, then I think that Privateer could be 2, or the same. With that now said, Lt. Carruthers would see his point cost go up to 8-9 points.
Privateer is essentially Ex-Patriot, but without giving the Mercenary keyword or allowing Mercenary crew.
WK valued Ex-Pat at only 1 point, so it would be consistent, at least with WK pricing, to treat Privateer the same.
The Loyal:X add-on is not really doing anything at all, aside from flavor.
If the “flag faction” is referring to the nationality of the ship you put the crew on (which is my assumption), that ship itself immediately satisfies the loyalty.
If “flag faction” is referring to the crew’s own printed nationality, then it’s plain old Loyal:[crew’s own nationality] and should be printed directly on the crew’s card instead of being buried in another keyword.
(This also ignores the fact that Loyal:X in general is almost entirely pointless, because you generally have to go out of your way to not satisfy it.)This would be a good thread to sticky to the top, or better yet include in a new post with any other relevant codes and tricks for posting on these forums.
I have a double set of the old Gale Force Nine islands, which always get used in place of the generic cardboard ones that come in packs. They’re nice and solid, but still very low profile and only slightly larger than the standard ones so they don’t mess with table size and are easy to store/transport in the same containers as everything else.
I’ve also “edged” maybe a dozen of my ships. (Use Sharpies/markers to color in the white edges of the cards.) It makes them look really nice, but it’s also incredibly tedious work to get into all of the little nooks and crannies, particularly if you use multiple colors to match the artwork. You can see an example here, in this picture I’d taken years ago:
/pic2282309.jpg)
ADDED: Those red and white sticks you see in the photo are plastic drink skewers cut to length. It makes measuring a LOT quicker and easier, especially in tight spaces.
Do the Jade Rebellion versions of the Clear Wind and the Divine Wind have the same ability? I noticed that the master spreadsheet gives them the same ability, but the actual text on their cards is different.
The Divine Wind has the standard wording for her ability: “If this ship shoots at a ship that was previously shot at by another ship this turn, she gets +1 to her cannon rolls against that ship this turn.”
The Clear Wind has: “If this ship shoots at a ship that was previously shot at this turn, she gets +1 to her cannon rolls against that ship this turn.” Nothing in there about requiring it to be a different ship. Read literally, would shooting one of this ship’s cannons at a ship give the following shots within the same shoot action the bonus, or does “previously shot at” refer specifically to a shoot action and not an individual cannon shot? If it does refer to an entire shoot action, would she grant herself the bonus if she got an extra action and used it to shoot again at the same ship she had already shot at with her original action?
It might be worth noting that the Cursed version of the Clear Wind from Ocean’s Edge changed the wording to the usual version, where it requires a different ship.
I don’t know why the text is slightly different, but I think they were meant to be the same ability.
In any case, the bonus is based on shoot actions, not individual cannons being shot. Clear Wind would only get the bonus from itself if it used an additional action to make a second shoot action. The bonus doesn’t kick in immediately after firing the first cannon in the first shoot action.
It was never a very useful site, but was nice to look at, at least. It’s too bad the old forums aren’t accessible that way, but you always had to log in just to access those, so it’s understandable why it couldn’t be archived.
The link to the FAQ still works. That looks like the very last version I put together before making the full switch over to the non-Q&A format of the current Pirate Code.
The original “how to play” videos were great too, but they’d already pulled those a couple years earlier, and never did get around to replacing them before the site died. I think they were Flash based, so even if they were still accessible, getting them to run on browsers now would be tricky (most have either dropped support entirely or make you jump through several hoops to run anything that uses it).
Delusion Flavor Text:
“Captained by Fitzgerald, who was stabbed in the back by Blackheart for a gold medallion and left to die, and crewed by pirates killed for their treasure by their own former crewmen, the Delusion haunts the seas searching for the gold that was stolen from her in life. A glowing mirage on even the most moonless waves, the Delusion tricks greedy sailors into believing that piles of “glowing gold” await just over the horizon. But this “delusion” only means that their lives and treasure become the eternal property of the damned.”We know that Blackheart took command of the Zeus from the Jade Rebellion (the flavor text specifically states that it was originally Baochuan). However, in Rise of the Fiends, where Delusion is featured, Blackheart captains a new ship: Fool’s Hope. So what happened to the Zeus? Why is Blackheart on a new ship? According to the Delusion‘s flavor text above, we see Blackheart mentioned leaving Fitzgerald to die. It’s a loose tie, but Blackheart is already associated with another 10-master, so it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to believe that it’s not necessarily a different ship.
I do have more, but I don’t have time to type it up right now.
It’s a stretch, at best. The flavor text doesn’t rule out the possibility, but doesn’t do anything at all to suggest it either. Blackheart has been through numerous ships over the various sets, so being associated with a different one after Zeus doesn’t say anything about the fate of Zeus.
The other thing to keep in mind is that RotF, and Cursed Seas in general, was set up as sort of a “reboot” for the whole series. The flavor text for Fool’s Hope sounds much more like something that happened early in Blackheart’s career, long before declaring himself “Emperor”, and arguably even before he had Harbinger.
I don’t think there’s any clean or universal way to retrofit this onto the game as it is, at least not without breaking several things along the way, but it would have been a cool feature to have baked into the design from the start.
There are lots of ways you could do it. Die result ranges where you you have to roll increasingly higher to hit at longer distances would be a simple general way to handle it. You’d lose most of the existing cannon rank distinctions using a system like that, but you could simulate it to some extent by giving bonuses (or negatives) to ships at specific ranges. A powerful warship might get +1 at short and medium ranges, while a runner might get a -2 at long range and -1 at medium range.
Another way (or even another layer on that same system) would be to use different dice for each range. For example, say you always need a 5+ to hit regardless of range. Most ships would have a D6 for short/mid ranges, but better ships could use a D8 or even D12 up close, while less capable ships might drop down to a D4 for longer ranges so they can’t hit at all without an extra boost of some sort. Another might get to roll 2D8 and pick either result at close range.
With varying dice, or varying rolls, you could even work defenses into the system more naturally. Maybe a ship could only be hit by rolls of 7+, or they ignore all hits from D8s.
I think I can make a case that Delusion = Zeus, but I need to do a bit of research into first.
There is a lot of overlap with the 10-masters, so if you can find something in the flavor text that supports it, I can add it (or at least a note about it) to the duplicates list.
Tenysius Lyons
Ability: Loyal: Mercenary. HI Raider. If this crew and a crew with the Helmsman ability are assigned to a submarine, that ship gets +L to her base move instead of +S.I get what you’re doing with this one, but the wording has enough wiggle room that it could cause problems. It could be argued that you’re getting +L in addition to the Helmsman’s +S, and/or that you’d still get a +S from Tenysius even without a Helmsman aboard.
It’s still kind of clunky, but this wording would work a little better:
If this ship has the Submarine keyword, crew with the Helmsman keyword give this ship +L to its base move instead of +S.Letting them go into the regular forum is probably fine for now. They would get much better/more responses here instead of being sequestered off in an adjacent area. If there is a sudden influx of reviews, and a new forum section was added, I assume any created beforehand would be relatively easy to move over.
This is handy to have for anyone that wants to keep writing reviews (or update previous ones).
Is there a good place for others to post them? Creating a whole new section of the forums might be a good option if there’s enough demand for it, and this post (or a duplicate of it) could be made into a sticky at the top for easy access.
That Google drive link to all of the images should be really useful too. Adding the names to each image (after collector number, so they remain sorted properly) would be super helpful, but is an understandably big undertaking. Do the different folder numbers indicate anything, or is that just for sorting purposes?
Jamaican Escape
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: Pirate
Rarity: C
Point Value: 10
Number of Masts: 2
Cargo Space: 3
Base Move: S+S+S
Cannons: 2S-3L
Ability: Schooner. If this ship begins a move action within S of land, she gets +S to her base move. If this ship is assigned at least 2 crew, she gets +1 to her cannon and boarding rolls.That’s a bit too fast for the price. Add a helmsman and you’ve got a guaranteed 4S every turn, and the 5S would be pretty easy to achieve most turns unless the islands were really spaced out.
Drop the printed base to S+S and it’s a more interesting design, but still maybe underpriced for what it gives you.
What hangups might “This ship may eliminate one treasure that she carries to gain a second action”…
That should work okay, and the existing action limit will prevent most of the potential abuse.
I’d personally prefer if it only worked on non-UT treasures so you can’t burn through all of those negative effects, but because this would only appear on a few ships/crew it won’t break things if UTs are allowed too.
…or “This ship can only be hit by ships within S of her” run into? I think that S-only must be excluded from S-immune; and S-only makes cancel crew more powerful.
An alternative to S-only is “L range cannons can only hit this ship at S range” which is a weaker version of the current L-immunity ability and seems safer to create than S-only.
On its own this ability sounds fine, albeit largely pointless. Lining up a shot so that your entire ship is outside of S-range can occasionally happen, but more often than not at least some part will be closer even if some of your cannons still need the extra range, so it’s only protecting against that very specific situation.
The biggest problem with this is when it gets combined with other effects. Forcing ships within canceler range is the obvious one, but there are a lot of other effects that apply within S-range too, like specialists and such. This could get particularly ugly if it found its way onto a ship that could not be shot at within S – even with this version appearing only on a ship or two, recruiters+copiers could pull it over to other places it’s not supposed to be.
I used to wonder about that a lot in terms of general fire masts. Here it would apply to current masts to simplify and so players couldn’t just keep their existing masts up.
“Replace a number of masts on the ship equal to the result.” Hopefully that replacement of the last sentence clears that up.
What would be really neat to see happen (in general – not specific to this ability) is that the fire would always take existing masts first, then would spill over and spread to empty slots, but for being a relatively easy concept to understand, it’s a tricky one to write out in a concise, unambiguous way.
Do you see any nasty rules issues by making Ransom faction specific, similar to Hostile and Loyal?
For example, “Ransom: Spain” would mean that only the Spanish could get the benefit of the keyword. This is for thematic reasons of course and to simulate some but not all nations putting a price on someone’s head.
Could even try to apply it in-game: once a named crew is hostile against a faction, they get a “Ransom tag” almost like the Bounties in Merchants and Marauders.
Mechanically and thematically it should work without any major issues.
Game balance is where it gets dicey. Being faction-specific, I’d be very hesitant to make it anything other than a 0-point ability, and not even as a “half point” that could put you over the top when paired with a Hostile or Loyal. Like either of those, but Loyal especially, that would make it way too easy to purposely under-price crew with little to no penalty.
The other thing to watch for, whether the tag can be applied after the fact or not, is tracking. Is it based on the ship that captures the crew, the ship that unloads the crew, whatever nation is the majority in your fleet, or something else?
When this ship sinks, roll a d6 for every ship within S of her, both at the point of sinking and when she docks at your home island via Eternal. The result is the number of fire masts that ship receives.
@Ben
Point costs and potential for breaking the game aside…What happens when you roll a number higher than the number of masts on the ship?
Does it apply to only current masts, or total masts? (In other words, do you fill empty slots with fire masts if there aren’t enough remaining masts?)Master Bianco’s “takes up no space” ability is the same as an Oarsman, so the stacking rule does apply. Only the first would take up no space, everyone after takes up one.
Amos’s “recruiter” ability is a little different, so it could be used along with Bianco or an Oarsman. Two different crew with Amos’s ability would run into the stacking rule, though.
The rules say that crew must be turned face up “when using its ability” – but crew like Master Bianco have a passive ability that is always active. I was thinking in terms of a situation like this: you have a ship docked at a wild island with a cargo capacity of 4, and 4 crew tokens are present on the ship, all face down. Then you indicate you intend to load some treasure. At that point, your opponent goes “how do you have space to load the treasure?” Is this the point where you would be ‘using’ the ability on Master Bianco and thus have to turn him face up? Or can you just say “some of these crew don’t take up cargo space.”
Normal links are not treated as abilities, so you would not have to reveal the specific crew to use them.
If you load stuff that would put you over the cargo limit you will have to state that a link is present, but (as the Pirate Code states) you don’t have to announce which specific crew are creating the link. It will have to be verified as legal at some point, of course. You can wait until the crew are revealed later by using their abilities, you can show it immediately after the game ends (or their ship sinks) if they didn’t get revealed, or you can find an impartial bystander (the “Privateer” back in the days of official WK events) to verify it.
If you use the “no space” ability of Bianco or an Oarsman to make room for the new cargo you DO have to reveal them, because then they would be using their ability.
4. The Ring (unique treasure)
-Load this treasure face up. This treasure cannot be destroyed, only transferred between ships. Before giving this ship an action, decide if The Ring is in use. If it is, then this ship can only sustain damage from Cursed ships. If this ship is sunk by another ship, The Ring is automatically transferred to that ship.This effect seems… incomplete.
Is there any reason why you wouldn’t want to leave the Ring on at all times?
The protection against all non-Cursed is huge, and potentially game-breaking especially if this gets transferred to a gunship. The only protection against it is using an all (or at least mostly) Cursed fleet, or digging out one of the handful of effects that can eliminate or steal UTs, like Jailhouse Dog or Rollando. If another player does get their hands on it, that just flips the problem back the opposite direction.The only actual negative to this at all is indirect, by giving a bonus to those two specific ships, but that happens whether the Ring is active or not. If neither of those are in play that negative is irrelevant. Considering how powerful the positive effect is, if you’re going to give the option to put it on or not, there should be some significant reason why you wouldn’t want to – and it should be something that matters regardless of what your opponents bring to the table.
That ship gains the Parley keyword for this turn.
This is actually quite powerful, because you can target a ship in the middle of a battle from far away, and make it very difficult to take down. As long as the ship is in a different location, you wouldn’t be able to cancel the ability effectively either to combat it.
When something gains an ability, regardless of how, it’s considered to be a source of that ability, so it could be cancelled directly.
Cancelling LT could prevent him from giving Parley, but that would have no effect on the recipient after it was given.
