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+
Phasmatis
Played a couple of times with long stretches in between. This can be a very fun game if you play it often enough with the same person/people. Always checking what card hands do what actions if you are unfamiliar. Plays within an hour which is a bonus.
MI guy
Got this game from Grand Con 2016 for participating in a charity event in which I got to play the game against the designer, Josh Cappel. I did defeat him, but I was suspicious of Josh throwing the game... Great guy and it was a highlight of the convention.
Legomancer
I'm a big fan of Merchants and Marauders, and was eager to try this out. This is a game of ship-to-ship combat, where you can aim to strike a particular point or just release the whole barrage and take what you get. There's a really cool aiming system, tied into standard playing cards (which is kind of odd to me...I don't really associate standard cards with pirates) that is really cleverly done. There's also an interesting idea where the more a target becomes damaged, the harder it is to hit. There's a lot of fun thematic and narrative stuff here, including the addition that the type of ammo you get is random; your dudes are just grabbing what they can. This is what ultimately brought me down, despite a strong performance; I was trying to hit a small target and couldn't get the ammo or cards I needed, even though my opponent could no longer evade. It's a lot of wild fun, though we didn't play with the special action cards. We looked at them afterwards and saw they were INCREDIBLY swingy.