KingPut wrote:


Got my first F2F in with Blackbeard tonight. As a 2-player game it's a bit abstract [need more action points to make the 2-player game a bit more fluid I think], but it's pretty clear to me that it will shine with 4 since more folks will have the opportunity to do Bad Things to the active pirates, as well as the fact that the cards will burn more quickly. I was also pretty impressed that we played a full game in 3.5 hours while (literally) checking the rulebook for each phase of every turn. Once you can internalize all the choices available to you, I can see this being a very smooth game.

I learned 3 key things in tonight's game [other than how to actually play the game in practice rather than theory]: (1) Bring your favorite d6 [in 2 colors], you'll be using them a lot; (2) I need to *completely* resort the counters for ease of play--I clearly made some very poor initial choices in how I stored things; and (3) I'll need to print and bring along some additional copies of the rules as everyone at the table should have a copy of at least the card-events pages and probably the port-event pages.

[The full effect text for the cards isn't always printed on the cards, so there are ample opportunities to say "Ok, so what the hell does this do?" As far as the port events go--well there's just a ton of choices to be made, and both of us were hamstrung a few times by getting things out of order or just forgetting that we could have upgraded ships if we had just left the chit on the board until the next turn]

I've printed the rules and I'll bring them next Friday. I started reading them. Overall, the rules seem pretty easy to understand but I can see how even an experienced player would have to look stuff up quite a bit just because of the length and number of cards to look up. But I'm looking foward to playing it.

KingPut wrote:


Cool. My opponent and I both dug it but we seem to have fairly similar taste in non-Euro gaming. I think Barnes is right that with more than 4 or 5 players the game can fall apart [there really aren't enough different cards, though strategies can change rapidly since the anti-pirate forces really pick up steam in the late game.]

Out of curiosity, is everyone else down with Blackbeard [or is everyone else Ken and our host]?

I finished the quick once through the Blackbeard rules. I've never read rules with such personality and attitude. It was like Richard Berg is basically saying this isn't some fucking Euro Disney Pirate Game. Pirates raped, pillaged, tortured people and got drunk and also there will be a lot of dice rolling and randomness. If you don't like it tough. Even with the typos in the rule book it was one of the most enjoyable rule reading I've had in a while. It may not be the worlds greatest game but I'm still pumped up to play it.

To make things simple I'm keeping Friday night to 4 people. Ken, Alex, you and me. If Ken or Alex's isn't up for Blackbeard, I'm bring StarCraft as a back up. It plays great with 3 or 4 players and I can teach that pretty well now.

Don't worry about bring Battleball for trade or sale. I found out Ken, Malloc and me are all good Ameritrash gamers and we all own a personal copy.

ken

did you get my pm with my cell? if so give me a call.

-M

Well, hopefully we were able to show Ken B. some Maryland Ameritrash hospitality.
Wednesday night was happy hour followed by Malloc crushing us in Ti3. Friday night we headed over to Iganaditty's house to meet Dogmatix who came up from Virgina. Dogmatix taught us Blackbeard and Fickle Finger of Fate gave Ken B. the victory on the high seas. We followed Blackbeard up with a late night game of StarCraft where I gave the newbies a Spashdamage Smackdown. May ended up be a great month in Maryland. We started with Trashfest and a visit from Uba and we finished playing some trash with Ken B.

Good times.
Verdict on Blackbeard: I'd be willing to try again with the "long game" (we estimated that might take us another 45 minutes), otherwise there's barely enough time to do anything. The only points I managed to get were from my King's Commissioner putting the smackdown on KingPut. For most of the game 3 of us were sailing around with 0 points. Definitely an experience game, which I can dig, but I need more experience there to be worth playing.

Verdict on Starcraft: I like the idea but the reality of it ends up less fun than Nexus Ops for me.

I'll do a front page update about all the cool stuff that went down this past week. Maryland ROCKS for gaming, I'll tell you that!


Thanks for the good times and hospitality, fellas. Also, apologies to Kingput for dragging him around Columbia, MD at 2 am driving in circles as I tried to find the way back to the hotel/restaurant where he'd parked.


I dug Starcraft, but kind of like the game of TI3 on Wed it felt like the endgame ambushed me. I also made the same mistake! (Responded to aggression rather than go after the person who's actually winning.)


Dogmatix moved onto my planet, and I told him, "I am going to kill you." He said no...but one turn later, all his guys on my planet were crushed. But the damage was done...my base was gone. That screwed up the whole rest of my game as I tried to jimmy up a chain of builds/mobilize but the system was still a little slippery to me at that point.



Blackbeard...the new tagline should be, "The game that just sort of happens to you."

Ken B. wrote:

I took the "I'm going to kill you as "eliminate you from the game"--those 2 [-sacrificial lambs[/-] brave soldiers were sent to do 1 thing: Crush your base and grab 2 victory points for me since I only had 1 VP/turn available to me at all otherwise. Of course, had either of us realized that I had no air attack capability in half that fight, I would have rethought that strategy. :blush:

I thought I'd grab those points that turn since I figured I get a Zerg Rush onto my 1 VP-bearing planet at some point very soon anyway and those 3 points and 2 turns it would take you to recover might well have been all I could get for several turns. I should have offered to leave a presence but not build a base there and both focused on cutting into Pete [I could have supported Alex in some fashion with another transport build.]

I fucked myself by the simple mistake of not recognizing that Pete's recommendation that 9-10 workers is plenty in almost every case UNLESS you had a planet draw like I had--no VPs but *huge* resources. I could have spent the first 2 or 3 turns doing nothing but spamming workers and upgrading bases. Then, on turn 3 or so, gone for a mass troop build. Not knowing Ken but knowing the Zerg strengths, I really did think that turtling would have left me with a swarm of bugs up my ass before the mid-point of Turn 3...

Regarding Blackbeard, a 4 player game *absolutely* requires one play "the long game"--4 somewhat aggressive players burned through so many cards, which then brought about too many of the "must play immediately" cards out of the deck, which further fucked pirates too much.

Although renaming all "scurvy" cards "VD Outbreak" when they struck Ken's ship seemed a fair and accurate house rule.

Having now played 1 solo, 2 2-player, and 1 4-player game, I am comfortable in saying that Berg fucked this game up by either listening to the BGG [and F:AT for that matter] masses either too much or too little. The game is a very uncomfortable hybrid of light-weight CDWG, a screw-your-neighbor card game, and a hardcore sim. I think a lot of people forgot how unbelievably tedious the original Blackbeard could be--while there certainly was a shit-ton of classic Berg chrome [thus many choices of things to do] there was also a ton of sailing around doing...nothing. It could have, to me, a similar feel to the early phases of the campaign in Compass' Silent War--your boat blows, your weps suck, and your enemy is better. Is it accurate history? Yes. Is it a fun game? Only if you dig simulations. Berg himself said he wanted to the original Blackbeard to capture the actual tedium of a pirate's life.

In the new version, he's done a better job of shortening the game and giving other players something to do but he just hasn't been able to pull his head out of "hardcore sim" mode. There aren't that many elements of that that are really visible, but it manifests itself in myriad small ways: The governors are all English because "we couldn't find other names"--well make some up motherfucker!; the event deck is 5 inches thick but there are only 20ish card types. Too much repetition because, I have no doubt, "we needed to simulate the reality of life on the seas." Berg just can't come up with ideas for interesting if not necessarily dead-on historically accurate events for game play.

The 1-player game is mostly a sim; 2-player game is a bit of an abstract but it allows just enough pirate and anti-pirate play to get all elements of the game working--including port attacks [BIG notoriety and points there], warship activity, KC's popping up and the like--save, perhaps, for pirate v. pirate action. But, as Berg points out, that didn't really happen much and allowing for that to happen might well turn the game into too much of a Disney pirate sim.

The 4 player game needs to have the hand-limit of cards reduced by at least 1 and I would suggest removing at least 2 New Governors cards and atleast 1 Storms at sea and perhaps 1 or 2 other "must play immediately." In addition, the game needs a greater variety of both pro- and anti- pirate EVENTS besides Debauchery & Revelry, Wear & Tear, and the Warships on Station.

Berg has said he's working on "Redbeard: The Barbary Pirates" now and that it's "a simplified version of the system." I think [hope] it will be a little more gamey [and possibly a little bloodier too as the Barbary Coast was more about the crimes and less about being an extension of European politics [which was what Caribbean piracy was in many respects."

I'm now firmly convinced that Blackbeard's sweet spots is either 3 players with a regular once through the deck play or 2 players but only if one adds 2 cards to both players hands and allows 2 cards to be played for Ops as long one uses only 1 Ops to a pirate and 1 AntiPirate action PER active Pirate, not player.

I actually kind of dug Blackbeard. I've never played a historical simulation (other than wargames) but my real gaming roots comes from sport simulations. As a kid I played Paydirt and Stratomatic so the whole dice rolling and lack of control thing didn't bother me. In the average sports game you’re going to roll the dice and look something up on a table about 50 – 100 times per game. You guys are pussies if think Blackbeard had too much randomness or dice rolling. I think it was pretty funny and cool that Ken B. won the game basically because the fickle finger of fate card came up and I had to give him one of my letter of Marque cards. He ended up retiring and raking up the points. That prevented me from retiring so Iganaditty was able to kill my pirate with the KC. I love that kind of shit, you’re not going to have that kind of stuff happen in a Euro pirate game.

I think one of positive signs for all 3 games we played this week Ti3, Blackbeard and Starcraft was that all three games ended too quickly. I would much rather play a game that ended too quickly than a game that I couldn’t wait to finish. I was telling Ken about playing Stone Age for the first time and ended up playing actions to make the game end quicker because I was bored. The quick game ending or keep games to less than 3 hour effect maybe from the BGG / Euro effect or it might be the reality of life in 2008.

We probably should have played Starcraft first and Blackbeard 2nd. I think it’s probably better to play the more strategic game at 7:30 PM and the more the random game late night when my brains fried.