Merchants & Marauders - Tips & Strategies

We’ve often found that the best way to force players to interact is to limit the amount of glory points a player can accumulate through their stash. Often the end game consists of a player with 50 gold rushing across the seas to his stash to claim victory with every ship in the sea chasing after him/her. By limiting stash points to 2 or 3 (or requiring 20 gold for each stash point) we’ve found players are more likely to go after NPCs and other players.

Due to the draw from the event deck, sometimes it can take several turns before any NPC ships appear on the board. If you’d like to see more action from them at the start, if you’d like to see more activity on the board, or if you’d like to increase the starting difficulty a little, try seeding the board before you start.

Simply go through the event deck until you find the first Pirate NPC and the first two Naval Ship NPCs (from different nations). Place all three on the board immediately, shuffle the rest of the deck, and then start the game like normal.

Here’s a simple house rule for players that don’t want to get locked into a specific role based on a random draw, or those that just like to have a little more variety in the initial setup:

When selecting Captains, each player draws two cards and keeps one of them.

This gives players a little more control over how they’ll play the game, but still keeps the captain selection somewhat random so players can’t always cherry-pick their favorite every time. Sometimes you’ll get the clear-cut choice between a Merchant and a Pirate, but other times you’ll have the a more subtle choice between two of the same “type” where their individual stats and/or abilities will give you direction.

As a pirate, the first few things you should be doing is buying any special weapons/upgrades you can afford, and going after merchants. a flute does appear to be a significantly more capable ship (and it is good), but a pirate player’s number 1 ship stat is manuvering.

With a manuvering of 4, you (with the help of a few ship upgrades and special weapons – cannons help) have a shot at taking down merchant players immediately. This is helped even more if your captain has a higher seamanship (taking advantage of an extra die over your opponent). Being a little aggressive can payoff bigtime, causing merchants to fear you and take longer journeys to stay out of your way, or otherwise alter your plans.

Potentially even more important is your attacks vs. merchant ships. Since merchant ships can escape with a number of “flee” markers (on the goods cards) equal to your manuvering, you must be able to accomodate this somewhat. This means that as a flute you can draw one card with a “flee” on it, and if you draw any more, you lose. As a sloop, you can take 3 flee markers, giving you much more le-way.

As the goods card deck contains about 50/50 of flee/hit cards, there’s a good chance you will lose a lot of merchant raids (unless you managed to get advanced sails for your flute, barely making it viable for piracy. The BEST raids are the ones in which you DON’T take damage. A sloop can lose merchant raids if it takes damage to the wrong area (destroying a station), but it is capable otherwise (and greatly succeeds if it gets multiple flee cards). Special weapon tokens help mitigate risk by giving you more flexibility to dispose of or change hit/flee cards. A flute can really only succeed in a merchant raid by taking hits, making it expensive and less lurative.

So, Sloops can take more cards in merchant raids with less fear of losing. For every raid over 12, there’s another glory point. Add in a little merchant killing, and you have a recipe for victory.

You gain bounties by committing acts of piracy against ships of various nations. You won’t want all four of the nations to have a price on your head, so you should try to focus on one or two as targets. Spain should be your primary consideration when choosing.

Spain has the most ports available so finding Spanish merchant ships should be relatively easy. Their ports also offer the most helpful game text for piracy. San Juan, Havana and Cartagena are great boons for enhancing your merchant raids. As a final bonus, the British at Old Providence will even offer extra assistance to pirates with Spanish bounties.

A common mistake is to make countries of harbors close to your own harbor quick enemies in order to make a buck. Why is this a problem? Well, moving across the board takes time, so I like to stay close to my harbor to get my coins safe before someone boards me and takes them. If the harbors around your harbor are unfriendly, you will have to venture too far away from your own, and this can waste turns… which can be painful in a 4 person game.

I am not condoning turtling in this game. On the contrary, attacking other ships is what makes this game fun and piratey. You just don’t want to waste turns ending up in open sea if you can help it.

Happy Gaming!

Honestly, it stinks to be a merchant when you really want to be a pirate. We let players re-choose or just plain go after the card they want. If you can’t get into being the merchant… you will flounder. If more than one person wants the same pirate… roll the bones!

So, you start your M&M game, you get a pirate captain (or choose one, according to some house rules) adn you’re faced with choosing your starting ship. Logical choice would be to get a fighting ship (sloop in case of the starting ships) for a fighting captain. Wrong, or at least unoptimal. Your goal as a fighting captain is to upgrade your ship ASAP – your sloop isn’t going to take you anywhere, you’ll get flatlined by most frigates and everything bigger.

What you want to consider is taking a flute as your starting ship. You want to get your first 30-35 gold as quick as possible, and a flute is way better to do this – just 2-3 good trades and you’re golden. When you get that 30 gold, you can get whatever big ship you prefer and start your pirate career FOR REAL 🙂

If you are interested in this game it is probably for you. Do not let the time on the box scare you away. Yes your first few games may take a while but you will be having fun in no time. After a few rounds of the first game a slight interest will turn into a love affair.

i think it makes the game more interesting if u have 2 slots for each nation