Pirate and Traveller (1954)

I first heard about this game a few years ago.  The first edition was 1911, but of course that one is $100+ if you can find it at all.  The 1936 edition is almost as pricy, but I was finally able to get the 1954 edition in near mint condition and set it up.

First of all, I love moving pieces on actual maps.  I also enjoy being the geography textbook who can help anyone find any spot in any country, thanks to my lifetime hobby of collecting stamps from every country.  For some of the places I even found myself starting brief history lessons.

This map is very well done.  It is not a graphical marvel by modern standards, but it captures the look of a page from an old atlas of the time period.  The travel routes are very well thought out, and match what I know of the history of trade routes.  The paths all make sense, and that skull in the South Atlantic Ocean fits where St. Helena or Ascension Island would be, so for a geography lover there's more than just the surface layer.  I love maps.

The one obvious flaw of the map is that the spaces get so crowded, the player's pieces sometimes cover 2 or 3 tiny dots with one fat pawn.  Even moving the pieces, we got to counting out the routes with our fingers and putting the piece on the landing space instead of trying to touch each dot with the oversized piece.  A tiny style flop.

What makes this game really work is that the rules change halfway through.  It was plenty of fun in the first half just drawing destination cards, finding the dots, and getting there.  But after a player completes their 10th trip, they are supposed to call out "Pirates All", at which point all players decide that their honest living was a drag and go into full pirate mode.  More like privateer than pirate, but okay.

In the Pirate half of the game, all players have to land by exact count on one of the three Pirate Base spaces up in Greenland, and at this point in the game if you land on an opponent OR pass over them, they have to hand you one of their cards and go back to the starting base in Cape Town, South Africa.  When I first skimmed the rules, I didn't see the bit about passing over another player.  I only saw the part about landing on a player and I figured that would be a pretty rare event with two players so it wouldn't be a big factor.  But passing over a player?  Those few words really make the endgame come alive.  Because we're both trying to get to the same space and there are multiple loops around that point, and there's a freaking 20 and 30 on the spinner!

That's enough points to loop around, bounce over the other player and stay near Greenland while they have to come all the way back up the Atlantic.  Or run them over on your own trip to the northern waste and send them packing.  It was chaotic and funny and definitely had some strategy to choosing the paths carefully once we learned what we had to do.  Anyway, the first time each player gets to Greenland they drop off up to 5 of their cards, which are banked and safe from capture, then restart in Cape Town.  And the second time a player reaches the pirate base, it's game over, players count their banked cards and win or lose.

This was the most fun I've have had on a reasonably realistic world map in a long time.  It's one we will definitely play again.  And I will probably be able to think up some variations, probably secret mission cards you can draw when hitting certain spots.  Cards that can give you a card, or maybe you keep them and play them later on to move to specific locations or defend against one attack from an opponent, who knows? 

This one is a winner.