Jon Gill rules feedback

[chrisglein]

• The ‘(quality doesn’t matter)’ at the end of the summary feels a little odd, since quality isn’t mentioned previously. You could introduce the term earlier by saying the Crown has to score four points by funding rum of various qualities, or change it to ’(points don’t matter)’.
• You say that each player has a menu of 3 actions to pick from, but looking at the rules summary cards, each player has a lot more than 3 possible actions. I’m guessing you’re referring to the number of actions you take a turn, but that feels odd in a section mostly describing components.
• The summary section capitalizes Crown and Pirate, but the rest of the rules leave them lowercase. Pick one!
• ‘randomly assign the rules reminder cards’ might make more sense as ‘shuffle and randomly hand the rules reminder cards to each player’.
• ‘Take the 4 island 🏝️ cards (including Home Port) and play them in front of you in a row.’ I’d change play to place — play implies taking a mechanical action in-game. Same for the starting ships in the Pirate section.
• ‘An investment is funded if it has 🟡 on it greater than or equal to the investment’s price (shown in the top left)’. Nitpick, but I think “shown in the top left of that card” would be a helpful addendum.
• ‘The crown may choose to not flip an investment, even if has reached its price.’ I’d change to ‘even if it is funded’. You just established a definition for funded, may as well use it for consistency!
• ‘The investment card will have game text that executes when the card is flipped face-up. It will indicate if it only triggers once or every turn.’ This feels a little weird to me, especially with the use of future tense. I’d make it more definitional: ‘Investment cards may have text that specifies game effects. These effects are only active when the card is flipped face-up. The text will specify if this effect happens immediately as the card is flipped, or if it remains in effect as long as the card remains face-up.’
• Actually, looking at the card examples, I don’t think that above text is even accurate. It seems like the example card is implied to happen immediately, but it’s not explicitly stated. Maybe the text should be something like ‘Unless otherwise specified, effects on investment cards occur once immediately when the card is flipped face-up.’
• ‘The text at the bottom of an investment card is “raid text” and is for the pirate. It is only executed when the card is raided.’ I don’t think this will cause any confusion, but you could get a little more specific by saying the white text at the bottom.
• ‘If the Home Port island has no cards on it (your deck is empty) you may play investment cards to it.’ This feels like the rule with the most potential for misinterpretation so far. Does the Home Port then function like any other island? Does the investment played become your new deck?
• Play a Hazard’ feels like it wants a diagram to clarify concepts like ‘the position furthest from the island’ and what orientation to place the cards in. #15
• Does Recalling a funded a revealed investment make you lose the points you scored for funding it? Put another way, does the Crown win by flipping and revealing 4 points worth of funded investment cards, or by having 4 points of funded investments revealed at the same time?
• Similar thought about clarifying that costs are in the top left of that card in the ‘Play a Ship’ and ‘Play Crew’ sections
• Play a Crew refers to ‘pirates’ and ‘crew’ interchangeably. Should probably standardize to just crew.
• ‘You may also rearrange your crew 🪝 in play between crew slots on ships ⚓ in play. You may also recall any crew cards in play to your hand as part of this action.’ You never specifically say that rearranging crew must happen as part of this action — I initially read it to mean you can do it at any time. You can probably reorder these sentences to get around this: ‘When you play this action, you may also recall your crew 🪝 in play to your hand or rearrange them between crew slots on ships ⚓ in play.’
• ‘You may move crew even if their source or destination ship has 🟡 on it.’ Has this ever been a point of confusion? This feels like an odd clarification to call out. I’d be tempted to remove it for simplification, since it doesn’t seem to actually define any new behaviors that would otherwise be missing from the rules. (Later note: Hrm, I see that ships with coins on them are ineligible for raiding, so I can kind of see the value in this, although it feels like it comes out of nowhere on an initial read-through).
• It seems like there’s a case (however unlikely) where the Pirate has no deck left and no player has scored enough points to win. Should there be a failsafe end condition before the game grinds to this point?
• ‘If there were any 🟡 on the face-down hazard card those may be used for payment or left on the card after it is flipped face-up.’ Nitpick: I think this could be better clarified as ‘This cost may be paid using any combination of 🟡 from the crown player’s supply or 🟡 on the face-down hazard card. Any existing 🟡 on the hazard not used to pay its cost remain on the card after it is flipped face-up.’
• Can the crown pay 🟡 onto face-up hazards during the Raise Hazards step?
• Is there any reason for the crown to ever invest 🟡 on face-down hazards? It seems like the Raise Hazards steps incentivizes the crown to just sit on cash reserves until they need to raise the hazards, rather than commit to individual hazards ahead of time.
• ‘Each hazard has one or more costs listed at the bottom of the card. The pirate checks to see if they can fulfill any of these costs. If they can pay one, they must. If they cannot pay any then the pirates have failed the hazard and the raid will be unsuccessful.’ This one feels like it could benefit from some wordsmithing. To take a stab at it (and check if I understand how it’s meant to function): ‘Each hazard has one or more costs listed at the bottom of the card. The pirate player must pay any and all costs they are capable of paying. If they are unable to pay any of the costs, then the pirates fail to overcome the hazard and the raid ends immediately in failure.’
• ‘Each ship or crew skill icon can only be used once per raid, so if a second hazard is being encountered in the same raid then those costs will need to be met by different members of the raiding party.’ Odd tense with ‘if a second hazard is being encountered’. Just say ‘if a second hazard is encountered’.
• Do players ever have trouble tracking which skill icons have been used during a raid? Seems like a potential for friction, since there doesn’t seem to be any counter, tapping, or similar visual representation to help players remember.
• It seems like ‘stop’ is being used as a key term to describe the end of an unsuccessful raid. A more thematic word could work better in this case — ‘repelled’? ‘Rebuffed’?
• ‘This may prevent or add a cost or side effect to raiding the card.’ This is a little hard to read due to ordering, as ‘prevent’ sounds like it could refer to ‘a cost’. ‘This may add a cost or side effect to raiding the card, or even prevent the raid entirely’ could be clearer.
• I’d probably move the clarification of “Add vs Pay” and “Trash and Discard” down into the Clarifications section. I could be wrong there, but I don’t think those clarifications are required to broadly understand the rules on your first reading, and it’s a little confusing reading those sections before having the context of any of the other rules.
• When raiding a card, you say that the raided card is discarded. If it’s a rum card, should the pirate player move it to a score zone or something? You say multiple times that the pirate player has to ‘steal’ rum, but I don’t see where you actually define what ‘stealing’ entails.
• ‘Rum can’t score unless there are 🟡 on it’. Maybe clarify that the crown can’t score Rum unless there’s coins on it — the Pirate player should still go after that tasty rum!

[chrisglein]

@jonagill FYI

[chrisglein]

Not yet addressed:

Actually, looking at the card examples, I don’t think that above text is even accurate. It seems like the example card is implied to happen immediately, but it’s not explicitly stated. Maybe the text should be something like ‘Unless otherwise specified, effects on investment cards occur once immediately when the card is flipped face-up.’

I made some improvements to the text but it may need more. I'm deciding if the card text itself is what needs fixing. AKA is there a very clear distinction between ongoing effects and one-and-done. Currently all cards will either say "trash this", "score this", or be ongoing.

‘Play a Hazard’ feels like it wants a diagram to clarify concepts like ‘the position furthest from the island’ and what orientation to place the cards in.

Yes, this could benefit from a diagram. Just haven't made one.
Also I'm still considering the option of allowing insertion.

‘You may move crew even if their source or destination ship has 🟡 on it.’ Has this ever been a point of confusion? This feels like an odd clarification to call out. I’d be tempted to remove it for simplification, since it doesn’t seem to actually define any new behaviors that would otherwise be missing from the rules. (Later note: Hrm, I see that ships with coins on them are ineligible for raiding, so I can kind of see the value in this, although it feels like it comes out of nowhere on an initial read-through).

It's been a minor point of confusion. I see it as a clarification that either can be done contextually or at the end of the doc in an FAQ.

It seems like there’s a case (however unlikely) where the Pirate has no deck left and no player has scored enough points to win. Should there be a failsafe end condition before the game grinds to this point?

I beefed up the text around rum counts to help with this. But essentially the math works out to it being inevitable. The failsafes exist, but I don't know if I need to spell them out in the text.

Is there any reason for the crown to ever invest 🟡 on face-down hazards? It seems like the Raise Hazards steps incentivizes the crown to just sit on cash reserves until they need to raise the hazards, rather than commit to individual hazards ahead of time.

As an invest action? Generally no. I could explicitly disallow it, but it requires adding a rule (you can put on face-up investments, face-down investments, or face-up hazards).

As a side effect of a card effect? Yes, then it's a fine choice to make.

Do players ever have trouble tracking which skill icons have been used during a raid? Seems like a potential for friction, since there doesn’t seem to be any counter, tapping, or similar visual representation to help players remember.

There's never been a board state where it's been a problem for anyone in my playtests.

More the question is what do people expect. And it's pretty split. The majority seem to expect that you can stack hazards to demand a higher cost. But a (large) minority also don't expect that to be a thing. I've leaned towards the slight majority and the option that is more interesting/powerful for the crown. But I could break the other way with an eye for simplicity. It's on my "is this the right decision?" mental list.

It seems like ‘stop’ is being used as a key term to describe the end of an unsuccessful raid. A more thematic word could work better in this case — ‘repelled’? ‘Rebuffed’?

I view there as being a budget for how many thematic terms you can use. Netrunner uses them all over. Instead of Deck/Hand/Discard it's Stack/Grip/Heap or R&D/HQ/Archives depending on which side you're playing. Cute. Thematic. But it makes the game harder to teach. So I'm spending my budget on other places, since "stopped" never comes up in card text.