Stefano Castelli
Italy
Rome
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"Piracy" has been a very hot theme in the past years and Bruno Faidutti crossed it in more than one occasion: in detail, he recently published almost at the same time two card-games based on pirates: the very nice Letter of Marque and this Captain Pirate, developed along with Gwenael Bouquin. The two authors already worked together with Knock! Knock!, another card game which shares an important mechanic with Captain Pirate: bluffing.
In Captain Pirate the players are pirates who try to organize expeditions to recover hidden treasures. To do so, they are given a set of cards and have to cooperate with other players to build a set of five cards of the same color and succesfully start the expedition.
At the start of the game each player is dealt 4 cards from a deck of 46 cards (7 cards for each color and 4 parrot wildcards). Then players take turns to carry out actions and propose expeditions.
During his turn a player can either execute two different actions from a list of four or "call" another player to build an expedition.
The four available actions are:
- Draw a card from the draw pile (which is replenished by shuffling the discard pile when exausted)
- Exchange a card with another player
- Look at another player's hand
- Show our hand to another player
If a player wants to start an expedition he has first to select a partner and then declare a color and a number of cards (from 1 to 4). The other player must now answer to the call by either accepting to cooperate (and thus adding cards from his hand to reach the total of five cards of the same color) or declining (because he does not have enough cards of the required color or he does not want to partecipate).
If an expedition is succesfully organized each player select one of the cards he has put to form it and propose it as a prize: the player who organized the expedition then has to choose between the card he selected or the one his partner offered. This is where the bluff come into play, because for each color there are just seven cards - two with a value of 1, three with a value of 2 and two with a value of 3 - so players can have a vague idea of which cards are used for the expedition and they can try to guess the values of the two cards available as a prize, considering that the remaining card will be assigned to the partner.
So, will I take the card I've put as a prize, with the risk that my partner selected a "3 point" card, hoping to keep it for himself? In some situations a player can actually know the value of both cards, but in most occurrences it is necessary to take some risk and add a bit of bluff. Also, note that the parrot card acts as a wildcard for the expedition, yet its value is zero for scoring. The cards gained in this way are kept secret (so, players do not know the scoring till the end of the game) and will be used to calculate the score at the end of the game.
When an expedition is complete the player who started it takes one of the six treasure cards available on the table since the start of the game: they do not count for scoring and are just used at the end of the game if there is a tie. Yet, when the sixth one is taken the game ends.
It is important to note that the sixth treasure card can be obtained by organizing an expedition all by ourselves, without the aid of another player: it is enough to have five cards of the same color to start the expedition.
If an expedition fails (the other player refuses to cooperate) then all the cards used to start it are discarded: this can be very damaging, altough some players may actually choose to start an expedition knowing it will fail, just to discards some cards and clean their hand (there is an upper limit of 7 cards, 6 when playing in 6/7).
Just like every other card game in the Cocktail Games pocket line, the cards are squared and quite robust. Artwork on the cards is excellent, very colorful and nice, drawn by Gerald Guerlais in his distinctive style. Rules - in english and french - are explained very well. The only issues I've got with the components are related to the metal box (which simply WON'T stay closed... just like every other metal box used by Cocktail Games  ) and to the colors chosen for the cards: blue is way too similar to purple and red can be easily confused with brown. After several games I'm starting to think that the color selection has probably been deliberate, as players usually struggle to remember if the cards they've seen on other player's hands are "purple or blue?". So, not much of an issue, actually, yet worth mentioning, expecially because players CALL for the color when building an expedition, so it could happen that someone puts down blue cards instead of purple cards and do not discover the mistake till the prize selection phase. So, if you play it, remember to call the expeditions using the color AND the captain name (which is written on every card - John Lemon, Green Bay and so on...).
Captain Pirate is a small game. It is simple and quite quick. There is not much depth, expecially because it is not meant to be there: it was meant as a light game since its firt design, as explained by Faidutti himself in the official game page.
The game works very well and although basically abstract in his mechanics, succesfully manages to recreate the kind of interaction you can imagine between pirate captains: they wish to cooperate, yet they are costantly trying to trick each other. This translates in lots of laughs during the game, which is always a good thing.
Just a last note about the player's range: the game is for 4 to 7 players, with some small adjustments to be made when playing in 6 or 7. So, it is nice to see a small card game which supports well 5-6-7 players, a feature which is quite unusual. On a side note, I also tried to play it in 3: it worked, although it was of course less fun.
It makes a weird feeling to rate a pirate-themed game using ninjas. Yet, I cannot deceive my habits, so... I'd rate Captain Pirate seven ninjas out of ten.
 
The Bottom Line: Easy, little card game with a pirate theme. Works well in medium-large groups (till to 7 players), it is mainly based on bluff and comes with very good artwork (and a nice small metal box). Considering that it is also quite cheap you can't go wrong with this one, except if you are looking for elaborate tactics and lots of depth. Yaar!
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Jonathan Franklin
United States
Seattle
Washington
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We had a problem - the rules appear to permit the captain and/or the quartermaster to select a parrot as their treasure card.
Because of the chance of getting nothing, quartermasters did not want to help captains, and the game fell apart.
Is there something in the rules to prevent the treasure card from being a parrot? If so, can the quartermaster support captain's 3 red with two parrots? If so, what does he use as his treasure card?
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Stefano Castelli
Italy
Rome
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grandslam wrote: We had a problem - the rules appear to permit the captain and/or the quartermaster to select a parrot as their treasure card.
Because of the chance of getting nothing, quartermasters did not want to help captains, and the game fell apart.
Is there something in the rules to prevent the treasure card from being a parrot? If so, can the quartermaster support captain's 3 red with two parrots? If so, what does he use as his treasure card?
Actually, I don't understand the problem. 
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Posted Wed Apr 7, 2010 1:23 pm
