"...to sail the wide accountancy..."

So humming, I set out on a couple of solo games of Blackbeard this weekend. I like Blackbeard, I really do, but the state of its rules, with a number of emendations, clarifications, additions and retractions in force, make it quite a difficult game to play at the present time and be sure you're doing it right.

Of course, if I'm having fun, I'm doing it right, surely?

Well, yes, but I'd like to know that I'm having fun whilst using the rules properly. Indeed, I'm quite sure that the rules keep changing as I play them, or more correctly, my recollection or understanding of them does. It'll be nice when that Living Rulebook finally comes along.

Still, solo games. Blackbeard against three "system" pirates.

Incidents and Commentary
I'm not going to give a detailed play-by-play breakdown of these two games. At some point, I intend to do so for a future game, but my note-taking has been a bit erratic of late. Instead, I'm going to relate a few anecdotes about what happened in the games.

Pardon? General? The first game saw the very first "Must Play Immediately" card being draw as the General Pardon game. It was obvious this was going to be a short game. (I've just been reading a few posts on CSW that imply that you shuffle the discards into the deck when you first insert the General Pardon card - no such cards were in the game). Of course, the second time I saw the General Pardon card there were only a scant handful of cards in the deck. No easy retiring for these pirates... they were there for the long haul!

Help, sir! Please! Chase off these Pirates! In the first game, Warships were curiously absent. I wasn't drawing them, and the SPs weren't using them against me. Were none being drawn? Well, not quite. Every time I drew a card for a SP's action allotment, it was a Warship card. The poor Merchant ships really wondered why they'd been abandoned. However, the King's Commissioners weren't far behind.

He was a good pirate. Here's one for Davey Jones! For the first time, I managed to sink a System Pirate. Poor old England, he was only in a sloop when one of the more fearsome King's Commissioners came over the horizon. He survived the first attack, although he took much damage, but he couldn't outrun the second attack and that sent him to the bottom. Hey, VPs for me!

So, when does this game end again? According to the rules (heh!), the game ends when Blackbeard retires with 120+ VPs, or the SPs score 100+ VPs between them. Thing is, does that mean potential VPs (as a pirate with 30 Notoriety is worth 30 VPs if he's killed, or 60 VPs when he retires) or actual VPs? Do the System pirates have to actually retire or be killed first? For both games, Blackbeard would have been just pipped at the post - he reached high notoriety and once he retired he would have won, but the potential VPs of the system pirates reached 100+ before he actually retired...

Beware, the KC hunter! The first game, it was Blackbeard who the KCs feared. The second game, one of the SPs went on a KC hunting cruise. Heavy Guns and great luck meant many KCs went to the bottom (well, two), and then he retired with a useful Letter of Marque.

Beware, the KC hunter! The second game, I, as Blackbeard, actually got hunted by a KC and it wasn't good. I had a Brigantine (the most heavily armed pirate ship), but the KC was brilliant, and he was rolling high. It required a couple of expenditures of Blackbeard's cunning merely to prevent taking more than a point of damage in the each of the first two skirmishes! The third battle finally saw Blackbeard take the wily KC down - I think it was Maynard. Blackbeard limped in with his battered ship to port, whereupon the next KC ousted him! Eventually he got away, but the amount of time he spent running allowed the SPs to do very well indeed.

Hostages? Who needs them! The SPs tended to be brutal with their hostages, slaughtering them for fun (rarely did they get any information out of them, never did they actually use the information). Blackbeard was pure kindness in comparison, ransoming them off. Although, I occassionally wondered why... he wasn't making *that* much money.

Net Worth? Sadly, no pirates ever got a net worth. They always retired or the game ended before they sold anything. No, wait, I think Blackbeard in my first game was worth 1000 doubloons...

Final Thoughts
Blackbeard takes me somewhere in the order of 60-90 minutes to play solo, although it takes up a lot of real estate on my table. I've bought a few cheap plastic "dipping bowls" from the supermarket which I use to put the chits in; they work very well indeed.

I'm enjoying playing it, although one can certainly say that luck is better than skill, and Pirates become famous through eliminating KCs rather than gaining booty... I wonder if there's something wrong there?