At time of writing my Volko Ruhnke’s Hunt for Blackbeard is on track to become my most played game since records began (c.2019, when I installed the BG Stats app on my phone). For all that, I’m not sure it is an all time favorite game for me. It’s just so…more-ish. This is enabled in part by the excellent implementation on Rally the Troops, which is also how I’m reviewing a game which has yet to receive it’s physical release. This means there won’t be any section on the physical production, how it feels to play, or what the blocks taste like. Sorry! In its digital form at least, this cat-and-mouse pirate hunting game flies by in a mere moment but has you wondering what if you did it differently next time. It is by far the shortest and simplest game from designer Volko Ruhnke (known for COIN, Levy and Campaign, and big boy CDGs), but it is not without many of his signature elements as a designer. I’m largely ambivalent about hidden movement games, but I’m logging game after game here, so there must be something noteworthy about this one, right?
Hunt for Blackbeard is a two-player asymmetric hidden movement game. One player is the Hunters, whose job it is to either locate and arrest/kill Blackbeard or, at a minimum, to disrupt his ability to do piracy. Blackbeard, meanwhile, is either trying to do piracy or to invest his ill-gotten gains into a legitimate retirement before he can be tracked down and arrested/killed for getting those gains in the first place. Blackberad must complete an ever growing selection of objectives from one of two tracks (piracy vs. pirate’s life), usually by assigning action pawns to them and ending the turn in a specified location (either a specific place or a type of place, i.e. in Bath Town or in any Town space). Some of these objectives will reveal Blackbeard’s current location, likely putting him in harms way and escalating the game’s tension if he can’t lose his pursuers. Some will also give him loot which he can spend on his retirement or, more likely, on weapons to fight the Hunters should they find him.
Your sideboard as Blackbeard, you will become intimately acquainted with it. The top two rows track your two possible life paths, the middle shows your available resources, and weaponry goes at the bottom.
Blackbeard receives a new pair of objectives each turn, which makes it a challenge for the player to plan ahead. This is clearly by design, though, and really helps to deliver a sense of tension in the game. You don’t have enough time or action pawns to wait and see what comes out of the objective deck. As Blackbeard you have to be completing objectives pretty much every turn, and if you fall behind the pressure can become incredibly intense. At some point you may be wondering if your best option is to try and get caught and risk it all in a big fight at sea, assuming the Hunters oblige you and don’t just hang out and capitalize on your failed attempt to secure your future.
The Hunters, meanwhile, can interview informants to examine spaces where Blackbeard may be or have recently been, and even place revealed locations under surveillance which will tell them if Blackbeard passes that way again. They can also scout locations near either of their two ships or their constable making his way overland and should they find somewhere Blackbeard was they can potentially daisy-chain a series of cost free searches to find out where he’s ended up (assuming they don’t pick the wrong path).
The Hunter’s sideboard. You can only commandeer equipment at your starting location, so you best pick what you’ll need for the whole game. You have more pawns than Blackbeard, but you have Informants to spend them on and three pieces to move so the costs quickly mount if you try and do everything.
Hunt for Blackbeard doesn’t drip feed information like some hidden movement games, allowing the Hunters to slowly deduce where their piratical prey is likely to be lurking. Instead, the game is played over just four turns, which could take as little as fifteen minutes with Rally the Troops doing all the heavy lifting. Blackbeard must complete half of his objectives on one of his possible life paths (pirate or retiree) in that time while the Hunters must either find him or disrupt him sufficiently that he can’t finish his objectives. As each side has a limited number of action pawns per turn, this gives you a very tight budget for your action economy in the game. You will only be able to do so much, and as Blackbeard you need to spend those actions wisely without exposing yourself while the Hunters feel each wasted search right in their pawn filled pocketbook.
Blackbeard has a bad habit of sometimes just getting caught without really making any mistake. In my first two games I was the Hunters and I happened to wander to where Blackbeard was on my first turn without having conducted any searches. This is, obviously, incredibly anticlimactic. Similarly, catching Blackbeard is largely decided by dice (unless you manage to try and arrest him with no path to escape should he elude you), and if things go very badly for the Hunters Blackbeard can capture their ships instead, winning the game for himself.
I was Blackbeard and I felt so clever that I left the Ocracoke Inlet and my opponent failed to find me. Then they arrested me on the next turn. Woops!
While both can potentially be frustrating, neither undermines my enjoyment of the game. Hunt for Blackbeard is so quick that I don’t mind just starting it again if a game ends prematurely. I’ve found that while no individual game is guaranteed to be great, the disappointments are brief and the good games have come to significantly outnumber the bad. I also happen to quite like dramatic dice-offs at the ends of games, like in Fort Circle’s first game, Shores of Tripoli, which is often decided (in my experience) by a desperate assault on Tripoli. It adds some excitement to the game’s final moments, and who really cares who wins anyway?
Should players fear that Hunt for Blackbeard is too simple or too random, there are numerous options for mixing up how you play the game. I have not tried the option where largest dice pool wins contests rather than rolls, because I didn’t get into tabletop games to not roll dice, but I have played several games using the Advanced Game rules. These are less a new set of rules and more a number of new equipment cards that both sides can recruit. The Blackbeard player can recruit Israel Hands who will go to a location on the map and potentially fulfill an objective there. They can also even separate Blackbeard from his ship and put him in town, potentially completing an objective in one place while the Adventure distracts the hunters. There are some other options as well, but these two are the most interesting I think.
The Advanced Game adds more options for you to explore as a player, which I think is a large part of the appeal of Hunt for Blackbeard, but neither felt completely game changing and honestly I will probably only use them some of the time. I do also have a minor gripe, in that the icons representing Israel Hands and Blackbeard Alone on the objective cards are too similar and I have confused them on a couple of occasions, which is just mildly irritating.
If we’re discussing minor gripes, I also find the tasks for Blackbeard that impose penalties until they are completed to be a bit of an irritant. They have great narrative potential but they can be quite frustrating if you draw too many of them in a single game. More so than that, though, is that I think they can often restrict your possible path to victory. If you draw several negative events that happen to be on the Pirate’s Life track, that kind of locks you into pursuing that path for victory this game. Given how so much of the joy in Hunt for Blackbeard is in picking a path and trying to make it work, I don’t love it when the game basically picks for me. The game is short and it’s easy to just set up and play again, so this is more of a nit pick than a grievance, but I did feel the need to hoist my flag and complain a little about it.
Hunt for Blackbeard is, of course, a historical game with at least one foot firmly planted in the wargame side of the tabletop hobby (no surprise there given its designer). While it borrows mechanics from far outside the traditional wargame space, I can see its lineage in the desire to tell an interesting story and make you feel like pirates or pirate hunters rather than in boring and mundane stuff like competitiveness and balance. Not to say that it is unbalanced, or that you can’t play it competitively, but just that it is more interested in telling you about Blackbeard’s final moments than it is in whether the “better player” always wins a given game. The better player will generally win in the aggregate, but each game has the potential to swing wildly against one side or the other.
This is perhaps its greatest strength, though. It is deeply historical. As Blackbeard you feel like a pirate trying to secure his legacy in what could be his final days. Death looms overhead as you desperately try and secure what you need without being spotted. As the Hunters you can afford to be a little more patient, after all you only really need to get lucky once, but as the game progresses that pressure will mount. You can feel the governor back at his desk waiting for your report, and he will not be happy should you fail. It doesn’t feel like A Pirate Game, in the general sense, it feels like the Final Days of Blackbeard, in the specific, and I think it’s better for it. There aren’t a lot of historical games like this, both mechanically and in terms of playtime, and as someone who loves first and foremost to feel the history in the game I’m playing this really hits a spot that had previously maybe been unfulfilled.
It also possesses several other, let’s call them Volko-quirks (Volquirks? Is that anything). First, the rulebook is…okay. I have historically noted that Volko’s rulebooks work great as references, legal-ish documents of how the game systems works, but are generally very bad at explaining to you what the game actually is. You finish them knowing how all the systems work, but not how that fits together into a game. Hunt for Blackbeard is clearly an attempt to change this, but with mixed success. It is much easier to understand what the game is from the rules, but it loses some of that Law of the Game quality which left me a little confused about how certain things work. I think the interspersing of game variant options next to the relevant rules was more confusing than helpful - I might have preferred them all be in an Optional Rules section at the end of the rulebook. Thankfully Rally the Troops was there to make sure I didn’t make a wrong turn anywhere, but without those guardrails I’m not sure I would have fully understood it from the rulebook. The core is simple and relatively easy to parse, it’s just little aspects of the system that I didn’t understand, in part because I haven’t played anything like this so I didn’t have a firm reference for what to expect. It’s far from the worst rulebook I’ve ever read, but I’d also say it’s no Votes for Women in terms of clarity of the rules.
The second Volko-quirk is that this is a game that I feel like I only really began to understand what I was doing after nearly ten plays. This was most prevalent in his previous Levy and Campaign games, where for the first half a dozen games you’re doing well if you manage to avoid starving your own soldiers. In Hunt for Blackbeard I felt like I was stumbling blind and hoping to walk into the pirate as the hunters or like I was stealing cookies and hoping nobody in the house was awake to see me as the titular pirate. Strategy wasn’t exactly top of my mind, I was just trying stuff and crossing my fingers. Now that I’ve logged a fair few plays as both sides I’m beginning to understand how to think in the big picture. I know the available objective/informant cards better, I can see the bottlenecks on the map, and I understand the underlying probabilities around arrest/escape/boarding attempts a bit better.
This is something I actually quite like about Volko’s designs - sure it takes a while to become proficient but that feeling of developing proficiency is so very satisfying. Being able to play these games on Rally the Troops is a huge help towards achieving that, although more so in the case of a long and complex game like Nevsky than in something light and fast like Hunt for Blackbeard. You could sit down with a friend and develop your own little meta in Blackbeard over the course of an afternoon. It offers so many different options and strategies for you to explore, so each game can be something significantly different but also so tight and fast that you can quickly finish it and build on top of it with another game. Two players could quickly develop strategies, counters, and new strategies in only a few hours. I’m sure a dedicated player could work out a handful of optimal opening plays, but to me the joy comes in the exploration and Blackbeard offers so much exploration for such a small game. When the physical game is available I hope I can find someone to spend a day exploring it again with me.
Hunt for Blackbeard is not my favorite game. It’s probably not even my favorite game I’ve played this month. It is, however, my most played game of at least the last two years. I could sit down and enumerate minor criticisms of it - how sometimes the strategy doesn’t feel that deep and early bad luck can stagger Blackbeard before he ever gets started - but I’m not sure those really matter. I say this with love and praise: Hunt for Blackbeard is like really good snack food. It’s not going to fill you like a gourmet meal, but after each bite you think “yeah, you know what, I’d have a little more of that” and before you know it you’re a dozen games deep and you see the North Carolina coast when you close your eyes. Sure you could just pick one strategy and play it every game, but that’s boring. Hunt for Blackbeard has given you a canvas (a small one, but a canvas nonetheless) and you should experience the joy of painting it with something new each time. After all, who cares who wins if the story is good?
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