Co-op Pirates

Last weekend, Robin and I spent a goodly number of hours working on a cooperative pirate-themed game. I'll not get into too much detail here, but important details are:

1) The big insight was that if you want to do a pirate game right, it really should be cooperative. Everyone wants to be a pirate, but pirates aren't really in the business of directly competing with eachother. Pirate's Cove was illustrative of this, usually the last thing you want to do in that game is spending the time and resources to fight another pirate, and you spend most of the game trying to stay out of eachothers' way. Pirates are mostly in the business of preying on the weak, so why not let the game itself represent the players' targets, and let the players work together to conquer them. Robin came up with a really nice theme for the cooperation, but I'll tease it away for now.

2) There's more to pirating than pirating. We tried to make multiple strategies that a player could undertake, and make sure that each is interesting. Specifically, players can a) attack merchant ships, while avoiding navy defenders b) smuggle contraband between islands c) explore far-off islands in pursuit of epic treasure. There are skills and items that support each of these angles, and no one player can fully adopt one strategy without weakening themselves in terms of the others, so players can informally establish roles for themselves, and work together in disparate ways towards a common goal. I see it almost in terms of a WoW clan, where players have different classes, and might find an item that they can't use, but that is useful to someone else. That's good, fun camraderie.

We have pretty nice systems in place for all of those details; mostly we need to refine out how exactly the actual ship movement hangs together so that the pacing of the actual pirating-smuggling-exploring subgame occurences feels right. Then its actual card design and balance, which will just be fun.

The biggest threats right now are component overload and rules complexity, but we've been pretty mindful of both, and it certainly won't be worse than Arkham Horror, or your average Fantasy Flight big-box game on either count.

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In other news, I suffered through the old ticketmaster price double-up to ensure I had my ticket to Ultimate Reality Live / Dan Deacon Set Jan 15th. Because, lets face it, Dan Deacon is the man that makes me most want to quit grad school, blow off my life, and become him somehow.