Blackbeard (published by GMT) is a game where players control different pirates, trying to get notoriety and gold and retiring them before they die on the high seas.
One of the key concepts to understand what this game is and is not is the fact that players will be controlling a variable number of pirates, not just one. This is not your typical adventure game where you "become" your character. While there certainly are some RPG aspects in the game, that's not its main focus at all. This is key because the game punishes players that try to stick with one pirate for the whole game, as it becomes increasingly harder to keep a pirate alive when his notoriety grows beyond a certain point.
Another key concept of the game is that players have to play two roles. During their turn, they play their own pirates but during other player's turns they play as the opposition to the active player's pirates. This aspect is so important it can break the game if players don't pay attention to it, as the game almost totally depends on the intelligent anti-pirate actions of non active players to hinder the active player.
Unlike your typical adventure game, there are few random events in this game, and most aren't very bad. A player that has no opposition from other players will find it very easy to win a lot of VPs. In order for the game to be balanced, all the players must focus on playing aggressively towards the active player. Also, if no one pays attention to the anti-pirate actions, the randomness of the way looting works will dominate the game (how much the cargo of a ship is worth is calculated with the roll of a die). When a player finds a nice, big ship in a rich area, other players must go ahead and try to scare the pirate with a warship or King Commissioner and not let him just take it without opposition. Else, the player that finds the best merchant ships to loot will win.
In this aspect, the game is very similar to both Androidand Marvel Heroes(two of my favorite games, btw). 446
In all three games, players take an active role when it's not their turns, and must play cards to make things as hard as possible for the active player.
Once you understand these two aspects and shed any possible expectations towards this game being an adventure/RPG game, then you can really get into it and start enjoying it for what it really is: a very nicely themed strategy game with a strong push-your-luck element.
The life of a pirate is hard. As you loot ships and do other nasty stuff like torture hostages for information, your notoriety will quickly grow. On one hand this is great as it means you're a successful pirate and you can potentially get lots of VPs. But on the other hand, it makes life on the high seas very hard as the more notoriety you earn, the easier it is for another player to bring a KC ship against your pirate. Unlike warships (which stay "on station" on a given sea area and don't move), KCs will chase your pirate relentlessly through the seas, and can even oust you from a port, making it very hard to repair your ship or sell your loot.
But not everything is bad, as while your pirate is in the game, there's a good chance you'll be able to upgrade his ship, either with some extra cannons (for a nice combat bonus) or by stealing and refitting one of the looted ships and trading some speed for a better combat rating. This and the cunning ability (which lets you re-roll a limited number of dice rolls) will make it possible for a pirate to confront even the toughest enemies and (with some luck) win the day, getting even more notoriety, which means potentially getting a lot more VPs.
I've said "potentially" twice already and that's because the only way of getting the full amount of VPs from a given pirate is successfully retiring him. If the pirate ends up dead before that, then the only VPs you get are the actual number of notoriety points you earned instead of the full points for the gold secured plus two times the number of notoriety points. This really makes a big difference.
This is where the push-your-luck element comes in: You must decide when to retire. Too soon and you won't get many points as your pirate won't be rich enough and his notoriety will be pretty low. Too late and that nasty KC will be chasing you around, making it very hard to even enter a port, let alone retiring safely...
Of course, you shouldn't grow too attached to your pirates because when you retire one, you'll just bring a new one to the table and go on playing. And if you don't do that, your pirate will most probably end up dead and you'll lose a lot of points because you're never really safe in this game. 218