Hunt for Blackbeard is a thrilling board game about myth, history, deception, and piracy

Everything you know about Blackbeard is, probably, wrong. Captain Edward Thatch’s career of piracy has been glamourised so extensively that even historians often struggle to separate fact from fiction. Every aspect of his life has been embellished, from birth to death. This sensational legacy gives you ideas about what a Blackbeard board gameshould look like.

You’re probably making assumptions right now. Blackbeard’s name brings to mind explosive naval battles and glittering buried treasure. Park those assumptions for a moment, because they’re wrong.

Hunt for Blackbeard is a two-player hidden movement game, designed by Volko Ruhnke and published by Fort Circle Games. It recreates the events that led to Blackbeard’s final engagement, the fatal Battle of Ocracoke.

One player acts as Blackbeard and the crew aboard the ship Adventure. Their goal is to sail around North Carolina, continuing a life of piracy while evading capture. Their opponent plays members of the Royal Navy, employed to hunt Blackbeard on behalf of the colony of Virginia. Armed with two sloops and a single captain on foot, they must deduce where Blackbeard is hiding, then close in to apprehend him.

The rulebook bears an important subtitle: “Simulating the true events of 1718″. The Hunt for Blackbeard is a game of deduction in more ways than one. This isn’t just a historic manhunt, remade in abstract with blocks and pawns. The players themselves are, turn by turn, deducing who Blackbeard really is.

Real people and events are cleverly scattered among the game’s mechanics. The chase plays out on a cramped map of North Carolina, with different ports, towns, and seas represented by wooden blocks. These blocks face Blackbeard, concealing his camp and movements from the Navy player.

Each round, players draw a new tile that determines their actions and goals. The Navy player gains an informant, based on a real person, who lets them scout certain blocks in secret. The aim here is to find sightings of Adventure, Adventure itself, or the camp Blackbeard will likely retreat to.

Blackbeard, on the other hand, draws two tiles: an ‘act of piracy’ and a ‘pirate’s life’. The former represents the captain continuing his conquest. He might raid towns, recover loot at sea, stow booty, or even deal with conniving government figures.

Alternatively, Blackbeard can choose to pursue a quiet life, spending the fruits of his labor on spouses, crew, doctors, and rum. Life’s simple pleasures, earned illegitimately.

There are only four rounds in Hunt for Blackbeard. If Blackbeard himself evades capture until the end of the fourth round, he can win by piracy. This only happens if the Blackbeard player filled at least half of one tile track with cubes. Fail to live either lifestyle to the fullest, and the Navy player wins by default.

Everything in this game is in short supply, though – money, turns, the pawns you spend on actions and movement. Every decision is crucial and cutthroat. If Blackbeard wants to win by piracy, he can’t juggle both tile tracks. He must choose who to be.

The only alternative is to prepare for war. Either player can instead win by besting the other in combat. Both Blackbeard and the Navy can invest gold in outfitting their men, improving their chances to fire, board, or escape. Neither knows what the other has prepared, thanks to privacy screens that conceal each player’s components.

Apprehending Blackbeard is the Navy player’s best chance of success, but they have to find him first. Scouting, either with informants or by physically exploring the map, is costly and time-consuming. And even if you do find Blackbeard, there’s always a chance he’ll board and overwhelm you.

Attempts at arrest, whether they happen on land or at sea, are decided by a series of dice rolls. You roll to battle, then to escape, and then (if you don’t want to escape) to board the enemy. Your preparations typically add or reduce dice on either side of the fight. Ultimately, though, you can only sway things so much – the end result remains random.

Board games are an interesting medium to explore history through. They present a reality in flux, where the victors of an exchange have not been decided. Blackbeard may, through a clever move or a lucky dice roll, survive the battle and go on pirating.

This subverts the facts, but what do facts matter to Blackbeard, anyway? Blackbeard the legend bears almost no resemblance to reality. His victory here only allows us to further warp Blackbeard’s spotty biography.

A win for the Navy, meanwhile, cements the truth. Blackbeard was not an unstoppable force, gunned down in a climactic final fight. He was cornered, awaiting pardon, and wholly unequipped for the battle that would kill him. A historical supplement included with the game tells us the Battle of Ocracoke lasted about an hour. The hand-to-hand combat that killed Blackbeard happened in less than six minutes.

The dice roll that decides the game is mechanically anticlimactic. You can spend the whole game making clever bluffs and efficient maneuvers, only to have fate betray you at the last minute. It deflates the thrilling cat-and-mouse you’d been playing up until this point.

Thematically, though, it’s a perfect choice. It captures the diceiness of a real naval battle. It also captures how disappointingly mundane Blackbeard’s death was. Blackbeard may be a legend, but Edward Thatch was just a man.

Hunt for Blackbeard is an enjoyable, if not overly innovative, hidden movement game. Its brutal efficiency is often thrilling. Plus, impressively, it’s a tense head-to-head that asks for less than an hour of your time. There are moments where its challenge feels unfair, as so much of the game hinges on tile draws and dice rolls. But, as a thematic experience and an artifact of history, it excels. It’s one of the most memorable board games I’ve played this year.

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A review copy of this game was provided by the publisher.

Source: Wargamer