Back in 2022, an eBay listing was sold and eventually ended up with a Pirates CSG collector. From that listing, it became known that Lucky Yeh International (also known as the Lucky Group and Lucky Worldwide) was one of the primary suppliers Wizkids used during the original production runs of Pirates CSG.
In this case, Michael would probably be either Mike Selinker or Mike Mulvihill
I have reached out to Lucky Yeh multiple times through many different channels, to no avail.
-March 2022: Sent messages through their website, another site, and 4 of their email addresses (some couldn’t be delivered to). Tried calling them but my phone couldn’t dial the Hong Kong/etc number.
-August 2023: Mailed physical letter to their Hong Kong location with questions about the dies (letter is at the bottom of this post). It just so happens that the first person I taught how to play Pirates is from Malaysia and knows Cantonese, so he verified the Chinese translation of the letter as well (it was also sent in English).
-November 2024: Sent inquiry through tradeeasy
-December 2024/January 2025: Messaged Lucky employees on LinkedIn (no responses so far)
-November 2024 – January 2025: In contact with them through Alibaba, to no avail. Representative was not able to connect me with anyone in the Hong Kong office, and couldn’t confirm any information about the dies and pictures shown in this post.
I have a feeling that either nobody there can ever say anything about the dies (even just their cost to produce and what happened to them), and/or there may be no employees still working there that worked on the project as late as 2008.
Here is the letter I sent them in the mail back in 2023:
Greetings,
I am interested in the work that Lucky Yeh International did for Wizkids on the Pirates Constructible Strategy Game (CSG) around 2004 and likely afterwards until possibly around 2008 when the game went out of print. I have included an example of a card from the game. It was also known as Pirates of the Spanish Main and Pirates of the Cursed Seas.
I would appreciate any answers to a few questions:
1. Does your company still have any of the equipment used to make the game? (such as dies used to press/punch the styrene cards)
2. If you still have any of the equipment, are you able to sell it? If so, how much would each item cost?
3. Do you have financial information about the production costs that you are able to share?
4. How exactly were the cards for the game made? (including the artwork, coloring, number of cards per sheet, and how the artwork was applied to the styrene cards.)
5. Was your company the primary and/or sole producer of the game during its entire production run from 2004-2008? If not, do you know what other companies were involved in the production process?
Get ready to travel to an exotic new locale and brave new waters with the latest Pirates CSG release!
Coming in January 2025, Seas of Japan is a mixed-set mini-release featuring no less than FOUR brand-new ship/creature types!
It features 11 total game pieces – four core ships, three crew, one equipment, and three sea creatures. The sea creatures (at a minimum) will likely be a collectible element of the release. Much of the release is still in progress, including the distribution model – the collectibility aspect may depend on how I can make the product. It is more likely to be collectible if I can make it on styrene sheets with full cards.
The entire mini-release is rather exotic – probably the most exciting part is that ALL the ship/creature types are new designs! There is a lot of novelty with it, compared to something like the Golden Seas set. It is a “mixed set” release, with game pieces from both of my huge custom sets: Age of Sail and Epic Seas. This means it will have both historical game pieces, and fantasy elements.
It is more focused on gold than combat, unlike my recent releases (HMS Victory and the Cursed Mega Pack). It’s a bit gimmicky, but that’s in contrast to products like Golden Seas.
The pictured ship is the flagship of the set – one of two Japanese atakebune!
Atakemaru
Nationality: Japan
Point Cost: 12
Flags: 3
Cargo: 4
Base Move: L
Cannons: 4S-5L-5L
Link: Kuki Yoshitaka, Mukai Tadakatsu
Ability: Atakebune. Two hits are required to eliminate one of this ship’s flags.
Atakebune keyword: A ship with this keyword printed on its deckplate card has removable flags that are treated exactly the same as masts on a normal ship (they can be replaced by fire masts).
This ship may be given move actions when it has no flags; its printed base move becomes S. When given a move action, this ship can rotate on her bow (the front of the ship) OR stern (the rear of the ship) in any direction as an additional, final movement segment (she cannot rotate on both bow and stern in the same move action). This ship cannot pin or be pinned.
This ship gets +1 to her boarding rolls for every crew assigned to her. If this ship wins a boarding party, she may steal one treasure from the enemy ship (winner’s choice), and eliminate one crew (loser’s choice).
This ship cannot be assigned treasure except for treasure taken via boarding party.
Crew assigned to this ship do not count towards the ship’s point limit.
If this ship has no crew, she cannot be given move actions.
Flavor Text: Mukai Tadakatsu wanted a new atakebune modeled after the six legendary Tekkōsen of Oda Nobunaga’s navy. With Yoshitaka in command of the war fleet, the Tokugawa Shogunate aim to strike fear in anyone opposing their rule.
Are you tired of the game being out of print? Have you waited years for our beloved pirate game to come back? Get ready to hoist the colors!
The first set to be commercially available since 2008 will soon be for sale!
Pirates of the Golden Seas is a half-size custom set that has been in development since 2021. After years of progress, hundreds of hours of work, hundreds of failed 3D prints, thousands of painstaking meticulous file edits, playtesting and more, the set is finally ready to sail. Disclaimer: This set is not associated or affiliated with Wizkids.
The initial print run is only 10 copies of the set due to the slow and labor-intensive production method, but I will be exploring additional production method options this year.
Each set is planned to be sold as a factory set (non-collectible). This is due to the difficulty of making random packs out of ships that only have 1 card each (the deckplate/stats card). However, it can bring relief to fans of the game who dislike the collectible pack sales strategy and proponents of one-time purchases and the living card game model.
The set contains 48 game pieces: 28 ships, 4 forts, and 16 named crew. There are 4 factions, including one new faction. The set will also be packaged with some other goodies, including a new alternate ruleset initially developed for use with the set. I generated the crew artwork with Adobe Firefly, which is the most ethical artwork generator I could find. From Adobe: “The current Firefly generative AI models were trained on a dataset of licensed content, such as Adobe Stock, and public domain content where copyright has expired.”
The set will cost somewhere north of $200 USD, given the enormous amount of hours and labor that have gone into making the set a reality. Tens of thousands of dollars have been foregone in potential wages and opportunity costs to develop and produce the set. Sales of the initial production run will be limited to 1 per customer.
I extend a massive thank you and appreciation to my main collaborators: Gigi, Chops, Xerecs and Vulkan. They each played a direct role in the set’s completion. Gigi designed the artwork for more than half the ships and also made the new ship designs. Chops made the initial designs for most of the new faction’s game pieces. Xerecs was a reliable partner for playtesting and rule/ability changes. Vulkan’s advice shortened the production process by many hours. I also have to thank the other gracious members of the community who helped me in some form or another: Woelf, DoubleAAsauce, TilorFire27, Arshellan and Gladius.
The set currently does not have a release date, but the set will be released in summer 2024. To stay in-the-know about Golden Seas, subscribe to The Pirate Press email newsletter for game piece previews!
Let’s have a look at the first game piece preview from Pirates of the Golden Seas!
HMS Devastator
Nationality: English
Collector’s Number: 012
Point Cost: 22
Masts: 5
Cargo: 4
Base Move: L
Cannons: 2L-3L-3L-3L-2L
Link: Captain Armstrong
Ability: This ship’s cannons may not be eliminated (masts still may be). If derelict, she cannot shoot. If this ship hits an enemy ship on a 5-6, also eliminate one cargo from that ship.
Flavor Text: Reinvigorating England’s presence in the North Sea is the Devastator. Capable of a heavy broadside unmatched by most navies, she sails forth proudly from Devon with freshly minted cannons.
The latest English flagship is an absolute powerhouse. This is the most expensive ship in the set. I wanted this set to have a classic feel, almost like a different take on the original Spanish Main set. A grand English warship to start off the game piece previews, which will continue up until the set is released.
Pirates of the Golden Seas is the largest project I’ve undertaken in my 13+ years of obsession with the game, bigger than Command the Oceans (the 3 month long full time campaign game I played in 2017) and anything else I’ve done. It has also been by far the hardest, with dozens of 3D printing setbacks, redoing a lot of the artwork files multiple times, and learning new software, hardware, and processes to produce the set.
I have avoided much of the previews and hype I usually share because I wanted to make sure it was possible before making a formal announcement. Many Pirates CSG projects have been started and abandoned over the years, including some of my own projects. I did not want an undertaking of this size to end up as false hope or a failed venture.
Getting this project off the ground was a huge workload. Every ship is 3D printed, with the longest prints taking over 5 hours to print just a handful of ships. In addition, every single ship has to be decaled by hand – for 10 sets, that means individually decaling 320 ships/forts, 480 cards, and 160 crew chips. As mentioned, in the near future additional production methods will be explored to hopefully drive down the time and money costs of making a set. Other distribution methods than a factory set may also be pursued.
There are some compromises I’ve had to make during production – sometimes the curved bow areas need glue to keep the decals from peeling, and pennants are generally a nightmare due to how small they are and the tolerances of getting them to fit onto mainmast slots (any potential future set I make will likely have the later mast designs to avoid pennants). However, there are also some advantages to the production method. PLA (polylactic acid, the filament type I used with the 3D printers) is less brittle than styrene, making the parts much harder to snap. In the main Pirates CSG survey, breakability of the parts was one of the chief complaints about the game, so this should be a major improvement. In addition, the artwork really pops from the glossy vinyl decals, with lamination doing a great job of protecting the ink.
Shane’s in-game crew, Thane Hartless from Mysterious Islands (#302, a Limited Edition Mercenary reroller)
Very excited to have Shane Hartley on the podcast! He was the Art Director and one of the graphic designers for Wizkids Pirates CSG throughout the production run, one of the core members of the team. He also made it into the game – you probably already knew him as Thane Hartless from Mysterious Islands!
Tiffany O’Brien is one of the key figures of Pirates CSG history, having held multiple important positions at Wizkids while the game was still in print!
Question of the Day: Do you wish the Dutch had been a faction from the start in Spanish Main? Would you prefer them as one of the major factions in the game?
Today (2/7/2019) I messaged Zev Shlasinger (formerly of Z-Man Games, creators of Merchants and Marauders), who now is part of their board game department.
Inspired by the annual “State of the Union” address, as the arguable leader of the current Pirates CSG community, I hope to make this an annual tradition.
2018 was a very dark year for the game of Pirates CSG. The potential closure of Miniature Trading prompted me to create a new forum on this website, which is an upgraded version of my old Weebly site. The community has become somewhat fractured, although it was already like that before the Miniature Trading crisis hit.
However, there is plenty of good news. The forum at Pirates with Ben is up and running, and Miniature Trading is still alive! Various parts of the community grew in the past year, with the Facebook group surpassing 200 members and the Discord server being created. However, the scattered community is part of the reason I plan to do things mostly on Pirates with Ben going forward.
Plenty of content is still being created, between my youtube channel and the Pirates CSG Podcast. It is quite possible that 2019 will see a bit of a decrease in video and audio content overall after the explosion of those in 2017 and 2018. Of course, there is still plenty to talk about, and plenty of games to play.
There is a lot of uncertainty in the Pirates world going forward. After a slight dip in some prices, it seems that the market is still one for sellers, with the Shui Xian recently auctioning for $79 and an Obago Deuce commanding a whopping $500 on eBay. Regardless, it seems like a great time to finish the decade strong!
Feel free to respond to this State of the Community address, and add your own thoughts! 😀
