Flying the Bloody Red: A Review of "Buccaneers of the Americas"
Addison Edgar is a new game designer. As such, he has obviously decided to keep his first few products safe and modest. Wait a second. No he hasn't. He's decided that the perfect first commercial game product is Buccaneers of the Americas, an attempt to recreate "Sid Meier's Pirates" (perhaps the most beloved video strategy game of all time) but with way more options and historical accuracy.
I can only wildly applaud this kind of hubris. In a world where new designers seem to have no ambition higher than creating yet another multi point salad with nothing to distinguish it from the multitude of other multi point salads on the market, seeing a designer create an actual passion product with grandiose intentions feels incredibly refreshing.
But does it come off?
At its heart, Buccaneers of the Americas has two main cores (along with some nice supplementary material like maps and calendars). The random tables and the rulebook itself.
Together, these lead to an extensive set of options and possibilities. Want a variety of ships to sail and fight against? There are eight listed here. Want your band of pirates to move inland for a raid? There are full land encounters, rules for land battles and movement etc.
This is the true strength of the game. It offers a remarkable amount of freedom to the player. My first playthrough was that of Raoulin Astier, a French pirate who constantly flew the bloody red colours and took no prisoners. He was killed in a perhaps unwise raid on Panama. Disgraced English aristocrat Broughton Hayton did rather better, with a royal commission and a policy of flying the correct colours as a legitimate privateer. Rather embarrassing, his flourishing career ended when he crashed his ship into a reef.
The rules are 32 pages long and this only scratches the surface. From wind to bounty to mutiny, everything you could possibly think of in a pirate game is covered here.
It's very much a game of historical pirates, not Captain Jack Sparrow. The attention paid to historical detail is impressive. A good example is the rules for the Spanish treasure fleet. Unlike a more cinematic pirate game, you won't be attacking the fleet itself, merely stragglers left behind. Because as the rules point out "attempting to take on the entire treasure fleet as a whole would almost certainly be suicide" and hence the game won't let you do so. I was also pleased to see that the historical notes go into detail about the human cost of slavery and colonialism at the time. This is often overlooked in pirate games and it's a really important thing to look into. If anything, I'd have been happy to see more historical detail here. Perhaps looking in more detail at the issue of the myth of the egalitarian pirate compared to the reality.
As is likely clear by now, I like Buccaneers of the Americas a lot but there are a few flaws with the game.
The first is that it largely just gives you the rules and the tables and expects you to intuit how the game should be played. I managed, but I think for anybody not use to this kind of game it would likely seem incomprehensible at first glance and have a high chance of scaring people off.
The second flaw is also one of its strength. The game is a sandbox and aims to give the player extensive amounts of freedom. Generally, this is a large part of its appeal. But I feel that the "retire when you've done enough" feels just a bit too vague. I'd suggest one of the two approaches would have been better here. Either just give an actual wealth target or a choice of goals to give a victory condition. This is the approach taken by Richard Berg's Blackbeard, probably the closest boardgame analogy to Buccaneers of the Americas in its historical chrome friendly approach. The second would have been to take a trick from Sid Meier's Pirates and include aging rules to try and push the PC towards a retirement over time. It's probably worth looking at house ruling one of these two ideas for your game. Something I'd have also liked to see is some flavour text on what your personal wealth (and possibly reputation) means for your retirement lifestyle. Not essential by any means, but I think it would have been a nice touch and I always like it when video games do this.
EDIT: The designer has brought to my attention that there are in fact aging rules included in the health section. So you can scratch that part, although perhaps they could be more visible!
Overall, I really like Buccaneers of the Americas. The only issue is I'm not sure I can quite see who it's for, apart from me, and my taste in games is the commercial kiss of death. It describes itself as an "solitaire action roleplaying game" and that's as accurate a description as any for what is a very unusual game. But of the potential audience:
- Trad RPGers may be put off by the fact it's a solitaire sandbox without quite as much freedom as you'd get with a GM.
- Solo RPGers seem promising, but tend to be on the narrative end of RPGers and I suspect battle maps and large amounts of historical chrome are a hard sell to them.
- Probably some potential with wargamers (at least those who will play stuff that isn't strictly military simulation) if you can get the word out to them.
This likely does not matter that much. Edgar does not strike me as a man overburdened by thoughts of market viability when it comes to designing games. And I wholly approve of that, it would just be a pity if a game this interesting doesn't find its audience because it deserves to.
Buccaneers of the Americas 8/10
An interesting and ambitious game which largely achieves those ambitions
You can find Buccaneers of the Americas on Wargame Vault