From Enigma:
A game of piracy on the high seas! Buy, sell, and steal cargo while improving your captain’s prowess and increasing your infamy.
Privateer is a board game where 3-6 players race to increase their infamy through the buying, selling, and plundering of cargo on the Caribbean high seas.
Privateer has undergone hundreds of plays and countless hours of testing to ensure that it is a fun game which remains strategic and exciting. After each game, players are hungry to play again with a new captain and to try their hand at a new strategy or play style.
This game was meticulously designed to be fun for both new initiates and seasoned players. We love playing board games. We also have a very large group of friends with diverse interests. Our challenge was to create a game that could be enjoyed by anyone who we wished to play the game with. The result is a game that has been enjoyed by children, teenagers, adults, and grandparents. The game takes a relatively short amount of time to explain (even to non-board game players), yet allows for deep strategy and rewards adaptive foresight.
The object of the game of Privateer is to be the first captain to amass a total of 20 “Infamy” points. Infamy is a measure of how fearsome, clever, and skilled your captain has become throughout the entirety of the game. Infamy can be gained through upgrades to your captain’s ship or through the accumulation of powerful and rare Relic cards.
Everything in Privateer is based off of your captain’s upgrades. Upgrades can be purchased in any of the game’s four unique tracks, which are detailed as follows:
- Sails: This track determines how quickly your captain’s ship can sail between ports. A higher sails score allows you to visit ports more frequently, catch and attack other ships, or even outrun other ships altogether.
- Crew: This track governs your captain’s influence. Throughout the game there are a large number of events which may transpire during play (called Fortunes). When a Fortune occurs, captains with a high crew score often receive larger benefits than captains with a lower score. For instance, during the Parley Fortune, each captain rolls a six-sided die and adds the result to their total crew score. The captain with the highest total roll may receive a free upgrade to any of their four tracks!
- Cannons: Upgrades to this track will allow your captain to best other ships in combat. This track is essential if you wish to plunder cargo from other ships or if you want to ensure that your own cargo will not be plundered by other aggressive captains. A captain with a low Cannons score can often fall prey to continuous attacks from greedy captains with an eye out for easy plunder.
- Hold: This track affects a captain’s ability to store cargo. Simply put, the higher a captain’s Hold score, the higher the number of goods he or she can carry and trade at a time. This is often a very important track for merchants, or even for pirates who often plunder large amounts of cargo at one time. What is the use in plundering cargo if you have nowhere to store all of your hard earned booty?
