Enfilade 2018 - Thar be pirates 'ere by Mark Johanson. Blood and Plunder.

Saturday night I played in a pirate game using the newish rules: Blood & Plunder. I've been hunting for a pirate rule set I like so I make an effort to try out new rules when I can.

The setup is that 3 pirate hunters have located the pirates safe cove and are coming in to burn em out. The pirates must resist. The pirates are outmatched on all 3 ships, but have a gun emplacement on a small island and, unknown to the hunters at the beginning, also have a few canoes with extra pirates who can row out and board.


The game was run by a great guy and his son from the Seattle area. Some liberties had been taken with the rules to try and make them play faster (notably all the ships on a side took an activation per card, rather than having everyone wait while each player did his thing).




Mark cleverly had a bunch of wood rulers with the range modifiers painted on in colour bands so it was trivial to figure out modifiers....slick move there.

You can see this in the right.




Early game one of the hunters took a mobility hit (spar and rigging damage) and was shortly thereafter boarded by it's opponent. The canoes, scenting blood, rowed in, using the pirate ship as cover from the hunter at the top of the pic (blue with green racing stripe). Hilariously, everyone started to board that melee. The blue/green hunter boarded the back of the black pirate ship, and the red lined pirate ship moved in to join as well.

Meanwhile my own pirate crew was getting methodically murdered by crack musketeers in the third pirate hunter. It was a combo of being outclassed, not having a great plan, and my opponent having above average rolls. Overall it was clear the hunters were going to get a solid win in this game.

Rules wise, I don't think this is the ruleset for me. It has some interesting features around playing cards to select who activates, and the 'later' the card the more actions you get that activation. There were a variety of special skills, and rules to hit, to save, and a multi step morale status (with decreasing activations, then pinned/shaken, the routing).

I didn't really like that you need relatively large numbers of figs (units are typically 6, and you'd probably have at least 3 units per side. I'm looking for more like a dozen tops). The activation, while interesting, could be streamlined. I'm not sure I care enough about extra actions for the late cards for the extra time/thought to deal with this aspect. Cannon reloading is painfully slow. Ships seem pretty resilient and crew saves seemed to be in the 50% range. Arguably convention games never play fast, but I can't see this rule set playing as fast as I'd like, given the difficulty in carving out game time in my life these days.