"You Decide: "Blood & Plunder Really The Best?"" Topic

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Is Blood & Plunder Really The Best Pirate Rules?

12% believe it's the best
21% disagree

No

A third of those familiar with the rules thought it was the best. That's not bad.

A friend and I started playing it this year. After the first game, having invested heavily in figures, terrain, ships, etc, and looking for "the" best pirate rules to use, I was horrified with how the rules played. Fortunately, my friend encouraged me, took one of my books home, watched several game play through on YouTube, as did I, and we had another game. This time it played much better. We have played a couple more times and the familiarity with the game mechanics has helped both of us enjoy the system. We need to play the ship section next but have hopes that we can overcome any issues more easily. Overall we are enjoying thus system and I thus backed Firelock Games' recent Kickstarter, Blood and Crowns, as it has the same game mechanics for Medieval games.
Regards,
Hitman
😎

There are a staggering number of interconnected variables at work simultaneously. I have to think few, if any, players are actually capable of playing the game correctly, even if absolutely determined to do their best to try.

Love the game. Highly recommend visiting the Blood & Pigment site for more background and lots of support posts on the game. The Oak and Iron naval game uses many of the mechanics from the B&P.

Blood & Pigment: bloodandpigment.com

Played it a couple of times. Found it a bit hard to get comfortable with ? Second game made more sense than the first <lol>

It's an Ok set of rules, but there is a lot of fiddly stuff. You must track fatigue, reloads, and activations for each unit. There are lots of special unit abilities it is easy to forget. The ship rules don't integrate well with the land rules.
On the other hand, their Victorian rules, Blood and Steel, are more streamlined and work better we found. The hidden objective system is very good. I've ported the initiative system from Blood & Steel to Blood & Plunder as it is simpler and we find works better.

No. Overly Complex. Prefer Donnybrook.

Way too fiddly, so we're making our own set, provisionally titled 'A Fistful of Seamen'.

The B&P system is the best I've played in this genre, ever.

Donnybrook is better on land in my opinion, Blood and Plunder's action on land feels generic, and instead of using things like formations and drill as mechanics they are just bonuses to dice rolls and that is bland to me, and a missed opportunity to have some good flavor to a set of rules that is supposed to be setting specific. It just feels generic. That being said, Donnybrooks sea rules are just a tad too broad and simple, and really seemed to be meant to add boats to a amphibious scenario, all of my Donnybrook at Sea games end up being sort of boring because you dont have enough options for things to do. Blood and Plunder's Sea rules are the best I've seen, you have lots of control over ship movement and lots of options in list building, it feels far more indepth.