Come to think about it, we don’t really have that many games about being space pirates. Why? Is it because space pirate fights are always supposed to be unequal? Well, the pirates of golden age of Caribbean piracy didn’t care about such things and you won’t care either as you play Blood & Plunder!
Blood & Plunder is a fairly uncomplicated game. Get your dice, roll them against a target, win. The initiative system is far more interesting. At the start of a round, both of you draw one playing card per friendly unit. You then choose a card, place it face down, and reveal it at the same time as the opponent.The suit of the card determines who gets the initiative… and also the action count! For example, spades go first, but only give one action to untrained and regular troops, and two to veterans. So you constantly have to weight your need to activate before the enemy vs. how many actions you wish to perform (and, in army-building, how reliably you want to be able to activate units vs. point costs). And boy do actions matter! While most combat maneuvers only consume one action, there are plenty of dedicated ones that consume more, including rallying when already shaken (fret no, dedicated actions may consume ALL your AP, but you get bonuses for the surplus). Plus, Blood & Plunder is set in the period of mostly shotte (though the Spanish want to have some pike as well), so reloading is an always present threat. Cannons take even longer than guns!Things get even tougher when buildings and boats get involved. First of all, the Blood & Plunder mostly abstracts building interiors, splitting them into 4″x4″ chunks of limited occupancy. Boats are just buildings that float and maneuver. They have their own systems that troops have to be assigned to. Boats are also the main reason why a single infantry unit can man more than a single cannon, a thing I haven’t seen anywhere else. This fairly seamless integration of systems means that, in one game, you can sail in, disembark, and assault a building without abstracting any of those parts to absolute nonsense or getting lost in the weeds so badly you’ll stab the next person to mention “natural biodiversity”. Outside the boats, Blood & Plunder is a fairly fast game to run. The combat is easy to understand, and the save mechanics ensure that you’re unlikely to run into any deathstars. As always, I’m looking for more in-depth morale rules, but what Blood & Plunder has is decent enough while also ensuring that anyone running MSU is likely to start losing complete units once they start taking fire. It’s really just the boats that are in anyway difficult to work with, and that’s because boat movement and system health don’t really exist in land battles. Actually, for full-on naval battles, it’s unclear whether you even need to have infantry miniatures, since even boarding actions share the abstract positioning of fights in buildings. I guess having minis around makes for cooler pictures and easier wound tracking. Yet it also makes Blood & Plunder one of the few games where smaller bases are absolutely better. Blood & Plunder is a good game. It’s smooth to play, runs fast, and you can easily glimpse the smart reasoning behind the rules. Plus, it features a free army builder and enough expansion material to cover any European power to ever set foot anywhere close to the region – even Denmark!
