Even though it’s not international talk like a Pirate day, I’d like to talk about Pirates. Specifically Pirates racing round Jamaica, in a game quite aptly called Jamaica.

Jamaica is a race game, with Pirates. The board has Jamaica in the middle and is split into sections that your ships move around. With other smaller islands there is sometimes a choice of routes (though never more than two). There are three types of sections, open sea where you have to pay food if you move there, ports where you pay gold to dock and treasure locations where if you are first you get a random treasure.

Each player is a pirate and receives a set of cards and a ship of a matching colour. You also get a small board that represents the hold of your ship. Each time you collect resources (more details in a minute) you put them in a hold. If you get one item or many, each time you put something into you holds it uses one hold, so you can have between 1 and 6 items in each hold. The items you can have are gold coins, food and gunpowder.

The key to playing the game are the cards you hold. Everyone has the same small deck of cards, from which you draw 3 cards. The cards have two icons on them, one for morning actions and one for evening actions. The first player in each round rolls two dice, he then decides which dice is for the morning action and which is for the afternoon one. Each player then plays a card when it is their turn. The icons on the card are for move forward, move backwards, gold coins, food and gunpowder. The dice rolls determine the value of each. So for instance if the dice rolls where 4 and 5 and you played a gold coin and a move forward, you would collect four gold coins and move forward five spaces.

When you move, this will lead to you paying or collecting something. If you land on a food section you will have to pay between one and four food, if you land on a port you will need to pay between two and seven gold coins. If you can’t play the cost on the section you have move backwards until you get to a section you can afford to be on. You also might land on a treasure section. If you are the first you receive a random treasure card. If you are not the first you just get to stop for free (rare in this game). The treasures can be cards that give you extra points at the end of the game, or take away points (move plus than minus ones though), or ones that give you extra abilities during the game (extra hold for your ship, ability to re-roll combat dice etc).

If you land on the same section as another Pirate, then you attack them. (if there are already more than one Pirate on the section, you choose which to attack). Both players decide how much gunpowder they are going to use, each one committed adds one to the die roll. Attacker rolls one die and adds gunpowder to the total, the defender rolls, highest total wins. If the attacker rolls the ‘star’ on the die they win automatically and defender does not roll. Victor gets to take either a treasure or the contents of one hold from the loser or if they have a negative treasure card they can give it to the loser instead.

Play continues until a ship crosses the finish line (one full circuit), the full round in progress is completed though. Victory points are totalled up. First across the line gets 15 points, other players get points depending on how far behind they are. If you are a long way behind you may even get negative points for position. Add or subtract points from treasure cards as relevant. And lastly add gold coins (you are after all Pirates looking for booty). Highest total wins.

Not a very deep or complicated game, but good fun and scales well as it is playable from 2 to 6 players.