Buccaneer / Seeräuber
Author: Stefan Dorra
Publisher: Queen Games
year: 2006
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A pirates life consists of being subject to great pressure of crude and uncivilised superiors, copious consumption of rum because of suffering from the labor stress, the occasional scrubbing of the ship’s deck, meanwhile hosting a parrot on the shoulder, and many boardings of foreign ships, collecting its loot and divide it preferably unfair. The three to five players in ‘Buccaneer’ only do the latter, but as a practise for the crude profession of pirate this is an adequate admission probe.
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Each of the players has a set of five wooden discs representing the buccaneers, printed with values from 2 to 5 and one buccaneer with a question mark. Each buccaneer starts the game with some loose change, ten ducats. From a blind stack of fifteen ship cards, the first three are put face up on the table. On each ship card can be seen how much pillage it carries: gold and other to be collected items; every ship has different values. At the same time it shows the minimum requirement of buccaneers for boarding the ship.
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In a turn a player takes a buccaneer in his colour, be it a lone disc, or a complete stack of discs from which the upper buccaneer must be in his colour, and places it on top of a rivaling buccaneer or stack of rivalling buccaneers. A player may not separate a stack; the whole stack must be moved and put on top of another. A stack may not grow higher than 9 buccaneers. Furthermore, the covered values of the buccaneers in the stack may not be looked at. |
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| When a stack has the required quantity of buccaneers, a boarding may take place. Only the player who has a buccaneer on top of a stack may decide to board with that stack, and on which ship. He receives all the gold from the ship but has to pay every buccaneer in the boarding stack according to its value on the disc. Also he has the first pick from the transported booty; the second highest buccaneer in the stack receives the second item, if present. |
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The buccaneer with the question mark always gets as much as depicted after the question mark on the ship. This all could work out well for the whole boarding party, where the pirate’s leader gnashing pays out his dues, regretting he ever decided to go aboard. All boarded pirates go back to their owners and can be put into action or build on by other pirates. |
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| When a player has three buccaneers in a stack with no one on top, he can force the player who has his buccaneer on top when it is his turn, to force a boarding. The forced player still may choose which ship he wishes to board. |
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As soon as the third ship has been boarded and paid out, three new ship cards are put face up. This continues for five rounds, after which all players count their ducats. The pirates receive a bonus for the collected items: when a pirate has the majority of a kind, he may add the printed value on this item; the other players only count the amount of collected counters of this item as ducats. |
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‘Buccaneer’ has a touch of ‘Memory’: a player must try to remember which values are part of the various stacks so as not to be confronted with high pay outs when he is in charge and carries out a boarding. When the revenues in ducats are small and there were high value buccaneers in the boarding party, he eventually has to pay from his own money!
A player will try to get his ‘5’ buccaneer somewhere below in a stack, topping a ‘2’. In this way he hopes players will forget the value, and, when he is not first when boarding, he still gets a considerable amount of money. |
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The second buccaneer in the stack also has a not to be disregarded advantage, if there is a second item to collect. The six to fifteen ducats that can be collected for the six majorities could be victorious. |
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Despite the apparent tactical element the game offers, it turns out that players battle for the top position in a stack whereby there are never more than three stacks at the same time built at; every single player simply does not want to miss the boat! The original game system as such becomes a bit of a lottery: which stack will (have to) board first, and how are my chances to do this as a leading pirate?
‘Buccaneer’ may be an original and nice, light-hearted little game, it however will bring little ripples on the sea of games.
© 2006 Richard van Vugt
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Buccaneer / Seeräuber, Stefan Dorra, Queen Games, 2006 - 3 to 5 players, 8 years and up, 30 minutes
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