Thursday, July 29, 2004

 

First Impressions:
Pirates of the Spanish Main

Yesterday Dawn and I went to Maximum Monkey in Hayward and picked up 10 packs of the new WizKids game, Pirates of the Spanish Main. It may be a stretch to call it a miniatures wargame, but there's a lot of miniatures gaming sensibility here. We set up and played a game last night. Here are my early impressions.

The first thing miniatures fans want to know about is always "how are the models?" In this case the models are actually styrene cards that you assemble into 3-D ships. The biggest is no more than 3 inches long, 3 inches high, and no more than an inch wide. The ship pieces punch out easily from the playing-card sized backing.

Assembly is pretty easy, but not trivial. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to assemble the larger ships at first. The pieces fit together using tabs and slots, which all fit snugly and firmly. You do have to bend the side of the hull to match the curve of the deck, but the styrene is able to take it. On the other hand, you should be careful putting in the masts. It's quite possible to break the masts at the narrow spots between the sails. You will be removing and reinserting these masts frequently during play. (Should you break one--as we did--you can superglue it back together. I would recommend using a bit of toothpick as a splint, though.)

When fully assembled, the ships are pretty cool. They're obviously card models, but they are attractively illustrated and nicely proportioned. During play I found them to be pretty light. Don't get too uptight about exact positioning--they won't sit perfectly still while you're taking off masts, etc.

The game is packaged like a collectible card game. For $4.00 you get a package with (I think) 8 thick cards. You will get two ships per pack; each ship requires 1-3 cards worth of pieces. The other cards will have islands, crew counters, and treasure counters. All of those are 2-D. Each player can theoretically play with only one pack, but I would recommend a minimum to two packs per player. Each pack also contains the rulebook (which at this point only has rules for two-player games; multiplayer rules are forthcoming) and a tiny d6.

The object of the game is to sail from your home island to "wild islands" where treasure is buried. You get the treasure and bring it back to your home island. Whoever brings back the most treasure, wins. Of course, being pirates, your ships are armed, and there are rules for attacking your enemy's ships.

Gameplay moves fast. Each turn each ship can do one thing, and one thing only. It can either move, shoot, explore an island, or repair itself. This keeps the game simple, but my wargaming sensibilities cry out for more complexity. Movement and distance are handled by using "long" and "short" card edges. A ship's movement might be described as "L." This means it can move as far as the long edge of one of the cardbacks you punched your pieces out of. This is a nice and elegant way of handling it. Turning, on the other hand, is unrealistically liberal--any ship can turn almost any angle during a move.

Combat is fast and deadly. A ship's combat power is measured in masts. Each mast represents one cannon and one "hit point." Every time a ship takes a hit, it loses a mast (and therefore a cannon). The smallest ships have one mast; the largest has four. Ships with no masts are derelicts, and are helpless. You can ram, send boarding parties, and capture enemy ships. All the mechanics are resolved with simple d6 rolls.

Many ships have a special ability. For instance, one small ship cannot be targeted by "L" range cannons. Ships can be further customized by adding special crew counters. For example, an Oarsman allows for a derelict ship to move a little. There are many others. Each ship and crew is keyed to a flag--English, Spanish or Pirate. You can't generally put crew from one faction on a ship belonging to another.

Our game took about 90 minutes to finish--not bad considering we didn't know what we were doing. It effectively ended when one side lost all its ships. I imagine this will be a common way to end the game.

WizKids prides itself on including everything you need to play in the package. I wasn't sure how they would do it with a little $4 package. I shouldn't have feared, though--one of the designers is James Earnest, also known as "that Cheapass Games guy." You won't need anything else to play, not even paper and pen. (You might want bigger dice, though.) As a small-scale minis game, it plays easily on a small dining room table. You won't need a dedicated 4x4' table for this one.

Overall, I'm fairly impressed. It's definitely a beer & pretzels game, but wargamers who desire more complexity should be able to add it without much trouble. Put on the Pirates of the Caribbean DVD in the background, and you'll have a perfectly fun time. WizKids has once again scored with a game that's fun from the moment you open the package until the game's end.

Jefferson 8:10 AM

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