Some friends and I wanted to run another Braunstein, so I put together a Pirate-stein to try my hand at developing and playing scenarions in a new genre. Pirates is a great theme for a Braunstein because there are plenty of shifting alliances and many different angles one can take. It ended up coming together very suddenly because, the morning of the game, it looked like it would just be one friend and myself trying out the “Don’t Give Up the Ship” rules with the USS Constitution vs HMS Guerrier scenario. When two more people told me they were coming a few hours before game time, I quickly threw things together. I came up with a scenario; I drew a hex map of an archipelago; marked a pirate haven on the map; and secretly wrote down other locations.
Here was my scenario: there was a Spanish treasure that had to be abandoned by the crew. A Spanish fleet is on its way to recover the treasure in 10 days.
Here are the roles I came up with, all starting from the same pirate port:
- A Spanish deserter, who knows the location of the treasure and has put together a crew and a sloop to go and recover as much treasure as they can.
- A pirate captain, with command of a frigate, who has heard about the trasure, knows the sloop is going after it, but does not know the exact location.
- A Spanish agent, in command of a frigate, who is working to ensure the other two players do not get the treasure, but whose identity is unknown to the other two players.
As we started playing, one of my friend’s sons was looking for something to do, so he joined in during the second turn and I quickly came up with a role for him. 4. An English privateer captain, in command of a frigate, starting from a location unknown to the other players at the edge of the map, and tasked with capturing or sinking and Spanish or pirate vessels in the area.
I took ship stats from “Don’t Give Up the Ship”, wrote everyone’s background and ship info on index cards. A big improvement over our first in-person Braunstien was to use index cards for orders and secret communications. This kept everyone mostly at the same table instead of running back and forth to have break-out discussions.
Here’s how the game played out: The Spanish agent convinced the deserter to team up for protection (since the deserter had a much less powerful ship than everyone else), but that they would need to achieve the agent’s objective first. The agent said he needed to go to the far side of the map, and off they went. The pirate captain decided to just start randomly exploring islands, looking for treasure. He immediately bee-lined for the correct island with the treasure. While he had his longboats dispatched to explore the island, the pirate captain was attacked by the English privateer, and a short battle ensued. The battle ended when the pirates were able to slow down the privateer enough to make their escape.
However, our Spanish agent player had to leave early, so the Spanish deserter sped towards the treasure. Upon reaching the treasure the deserter and pirate struck some sort of deal to split the treasure in order to have an advantage against the privateer. The privateer patrolled the center of the map near the pirate haven waiting for the ships to arrive, but the pirate & deserter took an out-of-the-way route and avoided a final showdown. It wasn’t a smashing success, but it was fun and turned out fairly interesting. I think this scenario would have turned out better with more players to fill out some ship’s crews, add a merchant component, maybe a town with fixed guns, and perhaps most importantly, a player paid to run messages between various ships.