Pirates: Sailing the High Seas!

First post!  Woohoo!

Alright that aside, weekends are a great time to spend with the kids.  So after running my two little guys ragged in the wilds of Jersey with Onyx, what better way to spend the afternoon than enjoying a nice board game with my kids?

Except my kids don't want to do anything inside except drain their little minds playing their iPhones.

So after several attempts at a board game, Onyx and I caved (they were beat from running around for 3+ hours anyway) and decided to play a  game ourselves.

Now, this game definitely merits an episode on the podcast itself.  It's called Pirates of the Spanish Main, by Wizkids.

Now some of you out there in Blog-land may say, "Ragna, that company is extinct."  And you would be correct, my insightful minions readers!  Wizkids went out of business a few years back.  It's a shame really.  Their mini games were actually quite fun.

A few months ago, my young one began to develop an interest in board/tabletop gaming.  He often sees my room/workbench laden with minis, and he's  always interested in what's on the paining table.

What's on the painting table.

Anyways, he's only 6; a bit too young for Warmahordes, despite the fact that he's brighter than my 9 year old.  I didn't want to pass up this chance to corrupt lovingly expose my darling son to the wonders of minis...

Pirates is/was a nice easy game that he can understand which also doesn't require a huge investment of time or money. It's also kind to those with short attention spans (Onyx).  

So despite the allures of iPhoney goodness, Onyx and I got a several games of Pirates in.  I'll save more of the actual rules for our podcast on the subject matter, but for now, we'll focus on the game at hand.

Pirates is easily adaptable to a wide variety of mods beyond its original rules.  The game's inherent systems are based on a simple 1d6 roll, and thus, easily incorporate cool additions and fun terrain.  Our game used the Armada mod:

To play you need generous amounts of terrain and access to a wide number of ships.  Each player starts with a new pack, or if you have an existing lot of ships, a selected ship and a randomly assigned ship.

Terrain is placed to quarter off portions of the table.  We ended up using "impassable" mountainous terrain (read: pieces of other board games) as well as 5 islands.  Treasure pieces are scattered at random on the island.  Turn order is Firestorm Armada style: you move one ship, then he moves one, and so forth until the round is completed.

I hear pirates are into booty.

In this mode, a ship's cargo stat is ignored, and all treasure earned is put into a player "bank." (immune to treasure raiding) Gathering treasure will yield the treasure piece's value +1d6.  At any point during an player's turn, a player may spend treasure in their "bank" to purchase a ship from a reserve.  In our game, we had a pool of 15+ ships to choose from.

Aside from getting dice stomped our first game, the game is really fast paced and fun, with a lot of firepower getting on board really quickly.  At one point, we had about 15 ships on the field.

This is where stuff went down...

Good times, good times.  Shame the kids didn't want in.  My son is a powerhouse fleet commander.

If you have the time and the money, and don't mind doing some digging, Pirates is a fun game to unearth from the depths of the internet.  Good luck and Happy sailing!

- Ragna