I am wonder about this too. There did not seem to be much AP action in the one two player game I've played. Not worried about it yet though.

Hope to play with more players this weekend at the Duck Club.

I'm curious as to how the 2 & 3 player game will differ from playing with 4 & 5. With 4 or 5 players a pirate player gets 2 pirates each while with 3 you can have 3 pirates active at a time and with 2 players it's 4. That seems like a lot of pirates for a player to play at the same time. It would seem to me that a player would simply concentrate on just 1 or 2 and the extra simply not get much activity in the game until the player either retires or gets killed the ones he is concentrating on.

Keep in mind that although you have more Piarates available in-hand in a 2 or 3-player game, you don't have to have more than one in play. I usually found it best to have two (at most), so as to not dillute their potential activities.

In playtesting, we ran the gamut from players focusing on one pirate to players focusing on all 3 (or all 4 in the two-player game). I always used the maximum number of pirates, while other players used fewer. My strategy was always to have a pirate in place to do whatever might come up at any given time (such as letters of marque, port attacks, etc.), although it meant that I had to spread the actions among the pirates. I also tried for KCs as soon as I could to keep the other players in check, especially if they were using only one or two pirates. I found it fun this way.

Yes, the dynamic changes considerably, and this was intentional. With 4-5 players, we wanted the emphasis to be on the Anti-Pirate actions, in order to keep the non-active players involved in the game at all time and minimize downtime. With two players, downtime is much less of an issue, so the pirates took precedence. Three players is right in between.

The game is quite a bit different with fewer players, no question about it. That was intentional.

Keep in mind that the number of anti-pirate actions available on any player's turn is limited to the number of actions they take. So, if a player only uses two actions on his turn during a 5 player game, only 2 anti-pirate actions can be taken against him.

You will need to re-read that. The only limitation on a Pirate action is that the Anti-Pirate actions have to be different from each other.

You are right. Thanks for the correction.