Corsairs

From: Rio Grande Games List Price: $20 Players: 2-4 Playing Time: 45-60 minutes  Type of game: Family Skill level: 3 Complexity: 5  Reviewed by: Peter Sarrett, Issue 25, Winter 2001

Arrrrrr!

Sorry. It’s hard to resist when dealing with pirate games such as Corsairs, but I’ll try to be good. Players try to be bad, boarding innocent galleys and earning points for their efforts in this card and dice game.

Players’ hands consist of a mix of six types of provisions and perhaps some pirates of varying strength. These provisions are used to create boarding parties and capture galleys. The use of food for this purpose is quizzical— surely cannons, cutlasses, and other weaponry would be more on-theme. I can’t recall any corsairs striking fear into their targets by brandishing bananas and beans. I know German companies shy away from war games and violence, but this is a bit absurd.

A set of galleys are dealt to the table, each worth anywhere from 2-8 points when captured. Every galley requires a specific set of 2-6 provisions to be played on it before a party can board. Once a player has met this condition he can make a boarding attempt by rolling dice. If the total of the roll plus the strength of any pirates the player used in his boarding party exceeds the ship’s defense value, the galley is captured and put in the player’s scoring pile. On a failed attempt, a penalty die roll may result in the loss of some of the cards from the boarding party (making it harder to try again next time).

If you don’t have the cards needed to board a ship, you’ve got a couple of other options. You can trade cards from your hand for the cards of your choice from the discard pile, or you can discard anything from your hand to fire a broadside— a fancy way of saying you can try to steal someone else’s food. If a die roll matches any food item in an opponent’s boarding party, the card defects to your party.

As galleys are captured new ones replace them until the stack runs out. For most people, this won’t happen soon enough— you’ll probably want to remove a few extra galleys from the game to shorten its length. The beer ‘n’ pretzels gameplay just doesn’t hold up under prolonged conditions. In smaller doses, the back-and-forth of broadsides and unpredictable die rolls makes for a breezy and sometimes exciting contest. The first two variant rules, creating a visible queue of upcoming galleys and awarding a bonus for collecting sets of like-colored galleys, are well worth using for broader strategic options.

That said, Corsairs doesn’t set my biscuits burning. It works just fine and will undoubtedly appeal to some (especially if you’re fast and loose with the pirate lingo), but it didn’t hook me. The die-rolling is really the core of the game, and that’s not what I usually sit down at the table for.