Fun and Board Games.com - Boardgame News and Reviews

Designer: Leo Colovini
Publisher: Piatnik/Rio Grande Games
Year Published: 2003
Price: $11.95
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Number of Players: 2 3 4
Age Range: 8-up Family Teen
Game Type: Set collection Card

The essence of rummy—draw a card, form sets, discard a card—is so simple that it’s been used in dozens of different games, but the number of pirate rummy games is sure to be tiny, perhaps limited to only one: Leo Colovini’s Corsari.

Playing this card game is unlikely to make you feel like a pirate captain, but that’s your job in Corsari. You need to hire a good pirate crew, one better than every other captain in the game. Pirates come in ten different colors, and within each color the pirates are numbered 1-11 based on their role (first mate, lookout, etc.) on the ship.

Corsari is played over several rounds. To start each round, players are dealt 12 cards, then a tavern of 7-9 cards is dealt face-up in a column, and finally one card is revealed from the deck to start a discard stack. On a player’s turn, you draw one card from the deck, the top of the discard stack, or the top of the tavern. You then discard a card to the discard stack, face-up to keep the round going or face-down to set sail and end the round.

When you set sail, you (and all other players) first discard all the pirates in your hands that match the color of the top pirate in the tavern. (Your prospective crew members decided to go drinking with their cronies instead of working.) Next, you form a crew with only two colors of pirates, with only one card in each role. If your colors are green and pink, for example, you can have only one 11 card (scribe) in your crew, one 10 card in your crew, and so on. Every pirate that neither joined your crew nor deserted to the tavern is considered a stowaway. Add up the digits on these cards to create your stowaway total for the round.

Other players can now try to fill in the holes of your crew. If you don’t have a cook, for instance, they can add a cook to your crew if it matches either of the crew’s two colors. Everyone else then forms their own two-color crew and determines their stowaway total.

And here’s where everything gets a bit tricky. Corsari was published in German by Piatnik and in English by Rio Grande Games—and the scoring rules in the two games don’t match, effectively creating two separate games. In the Rio Grande version, if an opponent’s stowaway total is higher than the player that ended the round, the opponent scores points equal to his stowaway total; if the total is equal or lower, he gives those stowaways to the player who went out, dumping his dead weight on someone who went out too early. If the ending player has a lower stowaway total than everyone else, he scores nothing for the round. Players track their points, getting kicked out of the game when they pass a sum of your choosing, and the last player standing wins.

In the Piatnik version of Corsari, you still compare stowaway totals and opponents still dump their stowaways on the ending player if they match or go lower than his stowaway total. The ending player still gets to dump his cards if his stowaway total is lower than everyone else’s. However, instead of scoring points equal to the stowaway total, anyone with stowaway cards simply keeps them on the table for the rest of the game. Future rounds are played without these cards. At the end of a round, if 35 or more stowaways are on the table, the game ends and the player with the fewest stowaway cards wins.

While the Rio Grande scoring rules work, the Piatnik scoring adds more to the game because the deck changes from round to round. You have to consider which cards have been removed from the game when you start building your crew, or else you might find yourself short-handed and looking at a boat filled with slacking nogoodniks. In later rounds, the game is tenser because most of the low numbers have been removed, making it difficult to keep your stowaway total low.

The tavern is larger with four players, but otherwise the game plays the same, which typically increases the number of cards removed each round, thus speeding up the game. This quicker pace increases the chance of fluke hands—initial hands with only a few colors—deciding the winner.

With only two or three players, the game lasts more rounds, giving you more time to try to win on skill rather than luck. Good use of the tavern is key to winning. Everyone knows which colors will potentially be dumped from their hands, depending on when the game ends, so they can use this knowledge when building their crews. If the tavern empties before someone sets sail, though, the round ends with no scoring, so you have to time your launching just right.

Corsari can be find ashore at online retailers such as Boards & Bits, Boulder Games, Fair Play Games, and Funagain.

December 12, 2006 | (6) Comments | Permalink