Merchants & Marauders: Broadsides
Expansion of: Merchants and MaraudersXVII century, Caribbean Sea. At the helm of your mighty vessel, revisit the golden age of piracy with Merchants & Marauders: Broadsides, a game in which you and your opponent are engaged in a deadly battle hoping to sink each other’s ship.
45m
2 - 4 Players
Ages 13+
weizur
Enjoyed it but does seem like there may be degenerate early strategies with early shots. Also seems pretty luck based. Still need to try it with the advanced cards.
raitoning
Honestly not too bad. A lot of reviews make it out to be the worst game ever but I was pleasantly surprised. The gameplay is tactical and frankly quite brutal, the theme is pleasant minus some awful art on the reputation cards, and the card play was definitely unique and felt like it played well into the whole pirate theme. One thing that is unforgivable though is the component quality, or the complete lack thereof. The player boards are flimsy and one of them broke right in half after being opened. The cards are made of poor material that makes them hard to shuffle too. The little meeples and wooden blocks are generic and frankly boring and take away from the theme. As the game is quite expensive at a normal price, it was really disappointing. I managed to get it at a good price so I could cringe a bit and overlook it, but imagine it would be quite the sting if I'd payed full price for it.
randystu5417
Boy I really wanted to like this game and gave it the good old college try but without some rule modifications I found it frustrating and disappointing. The game has a unique battle mechanic that I like. The graphics are ok, a little too cartoony to be taken too seriously. The rules are well laid out and easy to understand. There is lots of things that you can do and many ways to win. You start out fine and start battling down the ships. But with only 2 actions, you find you can't do much and have to make too hard of choices. I found adding one action or making the hold action mandatory works a lot better. This mechanic of 2 actions, slows things down too much and drags out the game. Plus, when you get down to just a few whatever (planks, men, or sails) it becomes really hard to shoot them down. Now I don't mean hard in the sense it is difficult, no hard in the sense you have to be perfect on the shot or you will lose 1 fire capability and with only 1 unit left, you automatically lose. Any other situation and why waste your time. So you end up drawing cards and drawing cards and drawing cards waiting for that 1 perfect card, and if your opponent doesn't play an evade, and you still have the men left, you can finally get that one last item off the opponent's ship. Sheesh. What a hassle. I felt like I was always in a catch 22 and got really frustrated trying to finish the game. A 6 is being nice.