Piece Packing Pirtaes review

["Mike Schoessow" <mikeschoessow@...>]

This is more or less a review of Piece Packing Pirates, now that I've had time to play it more times. As it turns out, my opinion hasn't changed much, and I now have more appreciation for some aspects of the game.

Firstly, I still really like the game. It has very good theme integration (if this was a commercial game, with the tile art depicting sea and realistic coastlines, and with the coins replaced with little ship pictures on round disks, and with the buried booty markers depicting treasure chests, the theme integration would have to be considered excellent).

Piece Packing Pirates is (as most of you probably know by now) a game in which the player is a pirate, sailing the seas (in my mind it's the Caribbean in the late 1600's the "golden age of piracy"). The 24 tiles are used to construct the seas. Areas without tiles are islands or coastline. The player starts out his pirating career with a very modest ship. Each time he moves into an area of the sea (a tile) that contains no other ships, a die roll determines whether a new ship is sighted (entered onto the board as a coin, number size up, with the number representing the ship's strength). The pirate tries to obtain booty by attacking ships he thinks he can defeat, and fleeing from ships he considers too strong. As he gets richer during the course of the game, he can upgrade his ship and increase his crew size to help in winning battles against bigger prey. This can backfire in some case though because large crews demand large cuts of the booty, leaving less for the captain (you). 

It's always nice to play a game that brings something fresh to the table in terms of mechanic, and PPP does this. When merchant ships appear within the same area (tile) as the pirate, their movement depends upon their size relative to the current size of the pirate ship; smaller ships flee while larger ones give chase or, if they are already close enough, engage the pirate. Simple, elegant, and realistic. The determination of wind direction via the corner suit tick mark on the tiles is also clever, and the inclusion of wind direction in the movement rules adds to the nautical flavor of the game.

Piece Packing Pirates also incorporates an integrated mechanic for making it more difficult to score points as the game progresses, so players must face the increasingly difficult choice of whether or not to "retire" and be happy with what booty they have. In some games, this choice eventually becomes easier again as it becomes obvious that the odds are substantially against you if you don't retire.

The final scoring equation essentially comes down to (booty on board)x(booty buried)x(notoriety). There are a couple of other terms that affect the score but they only become significant if you've had a bad (i.e., low scoring) game anyway. The important aspect of the scoring equation is that the score in a successful game is almost directly related to the product of buried booty times booty on board at games end. Obviously, for any given amount of booty, this product is maximized when exactly half of it is buried. This wouldn't be too difficult to accomplish perfectly except for two things. Firstly, booty is lost from your ship when you loose a battle. Secondly, no ship can carry more than 50 units of booty, so at some point you must estimate how much more booty you'll get before the end of the game, and bury an appropriate amount. 

I do have some minor criticisms of the game. I feel that the battle, booty, and scoring equations slow the game down and will be frustrating for some players. Understand that I am an engineer and am comfortable with higher mathematics, let alone multiplication and addition. But the equations can make the game feel a bit fiddly. To resolve ship battles, six terms must be considered: enemy ship size, pirate ship size, arms die roll, suns die roll, pirate notoriety, pirate crew size. Battles like this occur many times during the game. Concluding a successful battle, the booty taken is determined by another equation with four terms, two of which are random dice rolls. I'm thinking it might be possible to come up with a single equation that does it all (although I haven't worked one out at this point). The equation would give the amount of booty gained. If the result is a positive number the battle was won and that is the amount of booty gained. If the result is negative, the battle was lost. I realize that if the game is played many times over a short period, the equations, as stated in the rules, become memorized and the frustration substantially disappears, but if the game is played occasionally, the player will have to look them up every time. I partially fixed the problem for myself by writing out the thee important equations in easy-to-read 1/4" high characters as follows:

Your Combat = Arms + pirate ship + crew.

Enemy Combat = Suns +  enemy ship + notoriety.

For wins, booty taken = Arms x (enemy ship + Suns) - crew

It would be helpful if a player aid card containing just this information, in print large enough to read without having to pick it up off the table, was provided.

The game end scoring equation contains six  terms and three parts. Two of the parts only have significance in games that are low-scoring anyway, so I tend to not consider them (although, since this only has to be calculated once, at the end of the game, it's not really a big deal). 

I would also suggest that the game be played on a surface which discourages sliding or rotating of the tiles (a table-cloth is good), because the board is less fiddly then.

In conclusion, Piece Packing Pirates is clearly the game that deserved to win the Solitary Confinement competition. It brings fresh and attractive aspects to solitaire games and, most importantly, it's fun to play.

-Mike