P.P. Pirates, Multi-player

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

I've been playing Piece Packing Pirates this past weekend, and contemplating ways to come up with a multi-player version. Following are some ideas and observations. 

Playing the game as a solitaire, it becomes evident that there is a considerable luck factor. This can be fine in a solitaire, but many players don't appreciate too large a  luck factor in a multi-player game. So, I think the luck needs to be decreased. Having said that, I think this game looks to be much easier (and more appropriate) to adapt to multiple players than most other solitaires. It could be played just the way it is, utilizing a single piecepack, with 2-4 players each having their own ships and taking turns clockwise for example. In such a case, each player would use a different suit of token for his pirate ship, and merchant ships would always enter the board number side up. Each player would have his own score/status sheet, with pennies used for markers. The four pawns would be used for marking buried booty locations. To be a good multi-player game however, I think additional changes will be required. 

One change I would make involves the movement of merchant ships within one tile of the active player's pirate ship. Instead of the active player moving all bigger ships toward his own, all smaller ships away, and all equal size ships not at all, the player *to the left of* the active player would move ships in any way he (the player to the left) wishes, within constraints as follows. He may move up to a maximum of three ships, and all must be within one tile of the active player's ship before they are moved. 

Captured ships (coins) would be immediately returned to an opaque bag that the coins are picked from when new ships appear. 

A change I would consider during setup is to turn all tiles suit-side-up (after forming the board but before beginning play, all flipping done in the same direction). It's true this would randomize the wind direction, but it's also true that players would be able to chart their courses more intelligently knowing the character of areas of the sea before they sail into them. Overall, I think this might reduce the luck factor in the game and make for more strategic play. I may try this on the solitaire version to see how it affects things. It would also make the game less fiddly during play. It might also make it easier for large merchies to catch small pirates though, unless the pirates are judicious in choosing which tiles to enter and where on the tiles to stop.

Dice rolls would determine who goes first in the game, and before starting (and before tiles are flipped), players would choose their starting positions on the board in turn order. No player would be allowed to be closer than 2 tiles to another player (2 full tiles between them) around the sea perimeter. 

With four players, it seems like it may be good if somewhat fewer merchant ships appeared. This would also encourage competition between players. So I would specify that ships appear when the die roll is less than the tile number. 

Pirates would not only be allowed to attack merchant ships but also each other, and the rules would be a bit different when pirates attack each other. Each pirate would roll a die, and each one would have the score: (ship + crew + die). The pirate with the higher score would win, and get ALL the gold the other ship was carrying, minus the crew size of the winning ship. The losing ship would lose all its gold, as well as 1 crew. In the case of a tie, both ships lose 1 crew and no gold changes hands. It might be appropriate for both ships to loose 1 crew no matter what the outcome. Notoriety is not affected when two pirates fight each other. It's necessary that attacking other pirates is potentially more lucrative than attacking merchant vessels of similar size, otherwise player interaction will be too low. 

Players may "retire" any time they wish, or may continue for a full 20 turns. No player may take more than 20 turns. The ship of a player who retires early is removed from the board (another possibility is that it gets sold to the highest bidder among the remaining players, although this probably wouldn't work well with fewer than 4 player. Also, it's not clear that it would be good from such a sale to go to the original owner of the ship). This also brings up the possibility that players could own more than one ship. Haven't thought too much about that yet.

I do have a worry that players could get lucky early in the game, and then retire, before they can lose their booty to an attack. One way to discourage this might be to require that a pirate who retires before completing 20 turns must do so at the site of his buried booty, or he loses half of it. There may still be a bit too much luck in the game in general, or perhaps just too few opportunities to apply strategy. I'm also concerned that the game might suffer from a runaway leader effect; a couple of lucky battles early in the game can quickly make a player rich enough to trade up to a heavily-crewed galleon (that's happened to me in the solitaire version), able to attack pretty much anything out there. The notoriety factor in battles definitely helps in this respect. I might be useful making the notoriety go up by 2 instead of 1 for battles that yield booty above some specified amount. That also makes sense from a realism perspective (take a particularly rich prize and people hear about it and care about it more). Another possible way to address a runaway leader effect, if that does indeed turn out to be a problem, is to allow the player who moves the merchant ships, to move 1 ship no matter where it is on the board. For example, instead of moving up to three ships within 1 tile of the active player, he could move up to three ships total, 2 of which must be within 1 tile of the active player, and 1 of which can be anywhere on the board). There would also have to be a proviso that ships could not be moved on top of pirates other than the active player during this phase. At any rate, such a rule would allow the other players to effectively attack the leader. In fact, this "cure" might be too strong. 

Although I haven't thought much about it, I suspect that a different final scoring equation might be appropriate for the multi-player version.

I get the feeling that it would be good if players had additional options and decisions during their turns, but I haven't come up with anything I like yet. The game, as I've laid it out for multiple players, reads just a bit thin in terms of tactical and strategic possibilities in my opinion.

If two piecepacks are used instead of one, some additional possibilities open up. For one thing, pennies are no longer required, and there is a possibility of using an integrated score/status sheet, with each player marking his stats with coins of his suit (the numbers on the backs of these coins would need to be specified so the distribution of remaining coins in the bag is not inadvertently skewed number-wise). With two piecepacks, a larger board would also be possible, and I think, desirable. I suspect the best size would not be 48, but would be closer to 30. If the sea gets too big, the interaction will suffer.


Lastly, I want to say that I haven't play-tested a multi-player version yet. These are just some ideas, thrown out rather hastily (so don't be too hard on me if some of them turn out to be stupid after reflection), and based upon my experience playing solitaire Piece Packing Pirates (which is a wonderful game!). 

Let's hear more ideas! 

-Mike