A Review of Pirate versus Pirate

Review

Pirate versus Pirate

Out of the Box Publishing

Designed by Max Winter Osterhaus, Ellen Winter, and Al Waller

Linked in name, art design, and cute little sculptures, Pirate versus Pirate is a spiritual sequel to last year’s Ninja versus Ninja. I liked that two-player game, but given that two-players isn’t the way I usually play games, Ninja versus Ninja was pretty quickly moved to the back shelf of the game closet.  Pirate versus Pirate is a bit of a rarity as it is designed specifically for three players.  Though I’m sure two-player games are more played and more common than three-player games in general, I find myself in three-player games more often than any other number.  The problem with that is most games are terrible with three players—at least games that have any kind of conflict. Most commonly, two of the players in a game start picking on one another, and the third player breezes to an easy victory.  I’ve also seen a lot of games where two players both pick on the third player and that player has no chance of winning.  In either scenario, fun, certainly, has not been had by all.  So, when I heard that Pirate versus Pirate was primarily a three-player game (it will play two, though I don’t recommend it), I was both excited and worried.  If it handled three players well, it would certainly find some table time in my group.  If not, like Ninja versus Ninja, it would likely sit on the shelf gathering dust.

So, how did it turn out?  Pretty well. 

First, I’ll take a look at the components.  As you can see from the picture below, Pirate versus Pirate is a cool-looking game. The pirate sculpts from Dork Tower’s John Kovalic are just awesome. I didn’t really expect him to be able to top the ninjas from Ninja versus Ninja, but the pirates are even cooler looking. I found myself wondering what other games I could use them for so they could be seen by more players. The board is a triangular map board with three silver coins and one gold coin placed in the middle of the board, equidistant from the three starting areas.  The coins are attractive, but made of light plastic making them feel pretty insignificant in the hand.

And, it would make sense if they were heavier and more impressive, because the coins are the focus of the game.  To win the game, a player must pick up two silver coins or the single gold coin and return it to the appropriate spot on their home base.  Moving is accomplished by rolling two four-sided dice (These are cleverly designed four-sided dice, but I think I would rather have the traditional four-sided dice).    So, there is the roll-and-move component so common in traditional American board games and so maligned by the designer game community.  If you have too much of an allergy to randomness in your board games, look elsewhere.  The dice rolls are of upmost importance.  If one player rolls way above average and another way below average, the high-roller will win every time regardless of strategy. 

Luckily, there are plenty of rolls in the game, so the luck usually balances out.  And, you are not always looking for a high roll because of the strict movement rules.

• ·         A player must move just one pirate a number of spaces equal to the total of the two dice
• ·         A player may not move through another pirate (the opponent’s or his own)
• ·         A player may pick up a coin mid-move, but cannot drop off a coin mid move nor deliver a coin mid-move
• ·         While carrying a coin, a pirate may not move through or onto a spot containing a coin, nor may he attack another pirate
• ·         A pirate must land on the coin drop-off spot by exact count of his total move

These rules mean rolling high isn’t always the answer (though it will help you keep the action on your corner of the board), and they mean you are often forced to make moves you might otherwise not make in order to not waste a roll.

A turn of the game goes very quickly.  The player rolls the dice, totals them, and moves that exact number of spaces.  If the player can land on an opposing pirate by exact count, that pirate is removed from the game.  If a player moves onto or through a space containing a coin, he picks it up.  Then, the next player goes and repeats the process.  This continues until one of the players has met the victory conditions.  This will involve a lot of jockeying around to get your own pirates out of the way and clear a path to your boat, a process often aided by your opponent’s as they take out figures through attacks. 

So, does the game effectively deal with the three-player problems?  I think it does to a point.  Because everyone must venture out of their area to grab coins, and because those coins are limited, it is impossible to lose focus and ignore someone going for an easy victory.  I suppose that another common problem with three-player games is still a problem:  often Player B could stop Player A from winning by attacking the figure that is carrying the deciding coin but chooses to focus on his own coin and let Player C deal with it.  If this happens and Player C gets no rolls that allow him to reach Player A’s pirate, then the game is handed to Player A.  It is a charge that can be leveled at most three-player games and I’ve seen it happen with P vs P.  That said, the game is light and fast, so I don’t need it to be perfectly balanced, just fun and not obscenely imbalanced, and P vs. P is good on that front.   

For a roll and move game, it ends up being pretty clever and interesting.  As long as none of the players spends too much time analyzing their board position and attempting to make the perfect move, the game is light and fast-playing.  It works as a kid’s game.  It works as filler on game nights.  Given its price and the awesome components, I have no problem recommending the game for families and for gamers looking for a unique, three-player filler.

Fantasy Flight Previews New Cosmic Encounter Expansion

The Fantasy Flight blog has just posted another preview of the new Cosmic Encounter expansion Cosmic Conflict.  This update details a new race, The Saboteur, who has the ability to booby trap his home planets to potentially take out invading forces.  Looks pretty cool and very different from existing races.

Check it out here:

Cosmic Conflict

Review: Greenpeace's Anti-oil Propaganda Board Game: Deepsea Desperation

Review

Deepsea Desperation

Terror Bull Games

Free Print-and-Play

**Click Here to Download from Greenpeace.org**

Normally it would not occur to me to review a free print-and-play game released as a political tool on a company website.  It is not that I don't find the use of board games as a propaganda tool interesting.  It is just that free print-and-play games usually suck.  Deepsea Desperation, however, has a huge advantage.  It wasn't designed by a sub-committee in the marketing department, but, instead, sprung from fertile, and wholeheartedly satirical, minds of the guys a Terror Bull Games--a company actually formed and dedicated to the idea of using board games as political and social tools.  Terror Bull's War on Terror is easily the best satirical board game of the last four decades or so, finally giving the classic Nuclear War some company in the satirical-board-games-that-are-actually-fun-to-play pile.  Also of note, Terror Bull likely attracted Greenpeace's attention with an earlier print-and-play game inspired by an oil spill--Operation Bullshit Plug (note the bolded letters).  

Now we get Deepsea Desperation, commissioned by Greenpeace, and aimed not just at BP, but at BIG OIL in general.  In the game, players take the role of either heroic Greenpeace activists or evil oil company drillers.  Each side takes turns performing one of three available actions.  A sure sign this is a "real" board game is that the two sides have assymetrical choices and goals.  On the activist's turn, he or she can choose between these three options:

• Move 
• Occupy oil company ship (which costs the company money, but sends the activist ship back to its starting spot)
• Create a marine reserve in the four spots orthogonal to the activist ship.  These spots may no longer be drilled.

One the company players turn, he or she has the following choices:

• Move
• Lobby (which removes reserve tokens adjacent to the company ship)
• Drill ("...baby drill!") Company player rolls a die twice and gains money equal to the difference between the first and second die roll.  If a double is rolled, a "blowout" occurs and animals in adjacent squares are killed.  The deeper the water, the larger the blowout.

The goal for the activists is to form nature preserves on all the deep-sea spaces.  The oil company is simply trying to make money.  Both sides can lose if all of one animal species is wiped out during a blowout.  Of course, to ratchet up the satire a bit, you could always considered wiping out a species to be an alternative win condition for the oil company. 

And that alternative win condition might actually be needed to balance the game out.  The activists seem to have an advantage in our test games and I found myself drilling the heck out of deep sea spots hoping for a massive blowout just to keep the goody two-shoes activists from claiming a victory.  Regardless, the game is a cool little filler.  It plays in around ten minutes and actually provides some opportunity for playing well and earning a win.  I'm going to throw my copy inside my Nuclear War box and maybe it will get some play in the coming years--something I wouldn't have expected when I first heard of the game.

Score:  7/10

The Zombie Apocalypse has arrived...

In honor of the premiere episode of The Walking Dead, the nerdblogger crew dressed as zombies for the annual Halloween party.  See the results below.

Click on the poster to embiggen the image

Four Reasons AMC’s The Walking Dead Will Flop (and two reasons it won't)

Courtesy of AMC

Between this site and my podcasting on The Body Count, I’ve made no secret of my love affair with The Walking Dead comics.  As far as extended-run, non-super hero comics go, I think it is the best series of all time.  The psychology, the pathos, the existentialism, and, to be sure, the action and gore, all put the series high up the ladder.  In fact, I’d say that the first 60 issues are as good as any long story arc ever seen in the comic world.  And now we are on the cusp of having all that goodness turned into a well-budgeted television series made by talented people who have kept creator Robert Kirkman close and involved.  It should be a no-brainer that The Walking Dead on AMC will blow our socks off like a close-up shotgun blast, right?  Not so fast.  I can see a number of reasons that The Walking Dead could come and go quickly, and, unfortunately, some of the risks are related directly to what makes the comics so good in the first place.

1. They will focus on all the wrong things:  This is my number one concern.  Television, like film, is a predominantly visual medium.  The Walking Dead is loaded with visual elements that will pop on the small screen—scary imagery, a post-apocalyptic landscape populated by zombies, and gore by the bucket full.  However, none of that is the meat of the comic.  More than any other horror comic ever written, The Walking Dead is a character study.  If the production spends too much time trying to dazzle us with shiny objects and too little time exploring the layered psychological elements that power the story, the show will only appeal to people fascinated by shiny objects.  That isn’t The Walking Dead comic book readership and it isn’t the AMC viewer that comes for classic films or Mad Men and sticks around to see what this new show is all about.                                                                                       
2.  There will be too much gore:  Seriously.  When I heard about the project, my first thought was, “They can’t do that on television.”  It turns out “they” can.  The question is, should they?  Kirkman has been quoted as saying that AMC hasn’t flipped out over any of the gore they have seen in the dailies, and it is generally accepted that it is going to be like nothing ever seen on free television.  That’s good for me, and maybe for you, but it isn’t good for building an audience of housewives and soccer moms that will be needed to keep the ratings up.  If the show is done right, the story and characters are compelling enough to hold the attention of the Mad Men fans or anyone else that stumbles upon it while channel surfing, but not if they are so disgusted by the gore that they don’t give it a shot after the first episode.    I think the show would be better off if they gradually ramped up the gore over the first season.  The truly iconic violent images from the series tend to be toward the end of story arcs, so that shouldn’t be a problem.  If they come out with all guns blazing, it will please horror hounds, but it might backfire with the larger audience.                                                                                                                                                                                                  
3.  The season will be too short to build an audience.  Despite debuting right before Sweeps, The Walking Dead is basically the length of mid-season replacement series.  This means that the show has very few episodes to expand the audience beyond the comic book and horror fans that will be with the show from day one.  We know that a second season isn’t a given, and with just six episodes worth of material to put out there, will the general audience have time to discover the show?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
4.  Horror is the red-headed stepchild of series television:  This is the only reason my life in the current Nerdtopia isn’t perfect.  Sure, we get adaptations of The Game of Thrones, The Watchmen, The Walking Dead; we get great Batman and Spider-man movies (nuh-nuh-nuh-spider-man 3-I can’t hear you-nuh-nuh).  Indy comics are hitting the big screen in uncompromised glory (even if no one is actually watching them).  It is a great time to be a nerd, but, alas, not so much for the horror nerd—at least not on television.  The last horror series to be a hit on network television was…wait, there has never been a hit horror series on network television.  Buffy was a critical hit and had a great seven-year run, but it faced cancellation at the end of nearly every season.  Supernatural has experienced a similar fate though with lower highs and higher lows.  The only time we have seen any real success is with a horror/sci-fi blend: X-files,  V, Fringe.  There have been a number of good series, just not many successful ones.  “Why” is a topic for another post, but I wonder if there are enough fans of the genre to make a horror show a hit, especially when the show is epic and expensive and really needs to be a hit, not just a moderate success. 

Two Reasons Not to Worry About the Above and (Why We Expect The Walking Dead to be a Huge Hit)

1. The source material kicks all kinds of ass:  As I said in the intro, The Walking Dead is as good as it gets in the comic book world, in the horror world, in the writing world.  If the team stays on target and puts the best elements of the comic on the screen, the show will find an audience.  There is probably a great play on “the cream always rises to the top” idiom using blood or brains or something to use here, but I can’t come up with it.                                                                                       
2. They are keeping Kirkman close:  All reports are that Robert Kirkman has been involved creatively in nearly every facet of the show.  No one knows better than him what makes The Walking Dead great, and his involvement should be the gris-gris that keeps the evil spirits away. 

We won’t have to wait long to see which of the above scenarios plays out.  The counter on the web site tells me we have only ten days and a few odd hours to wait.  Personally, I’m an optimist.  I always see the zombie as half dead.  The worst-case scenario:  we have a great Season One box set to slide in beside Firefly on the bookshelf.