Buccaneers

We recently finished the course Advanced Game Design during which I and three others have developed a board game that we named Buccaneers. The game has a pirate theme and lets players sail around the game board searching for treasure and fighting sea battles.

The movement system in Buccaneers is centered around the ever changing wind. Players sail along a hexagonal grid at a speed dictated by the wind’s direction, if you sail with the wind, you get further in one turn than if you sail upwind.

Players hunt for treasure using treasure map cards. By identifying and sailing to the area marked with an X on a treasure map, players are rewarded with the game’s currency, gold coins, that can be traded for cannons and voodoo cards with magical effects.

The combat system in Buccaneers is at it’s heart an arms race. All players start the game with one cannon each. During the game, the players can upgrade their ships by buying more cannons and placing up to two cannons on each of their ship’s six sides. The more cannons you have on one side, the higher your chance of succeeding with (or defending against) an attack in that direction.

Among the treasures are four pirate relics, in order to win the game, a player must get a hold of all four. These relics can be aquired, either by treasure hunting or by defeating those that carry them in battle.

I’m very pleased with what we managed to create in just four weeks time and I feel that the game became engaging and intuitive. But there are some things left that I would love to improve upon. I would especially like to work out the balance between positive and negative feedback for leading and trailing players as well as experiment a bit with the win condition in order to narrow down the game’s duration, as one session can last for anything from half an hour to two hours as it is today.