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Gould's latest dice game, Buccaneer Bones, is a smaller, faster design in the Yahtzee school as players want to roll pairs and triples to power their boats through the waters and bring treasure back to port.
Each player has her own playing board, with a sextet of pirate ships starting in the ports across the top. On a turn, a player rolls four dice, keeps as many she wants, rerolls the rest, then advances ships toward the southern islands, with a pair moving the ship in the matching column one space and a triple moving it two spaces. All right — you're halfway there!
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Depending on the islands you occupy with your ships, you receive bonus powers on subsequent rolls:
-----• When on islands 1 or 6, she rolls one extra die; on islands 1 and 6, she rolls two extra dice.
-----• When on islands 2 or 5, she can add or subtract one from a rolled die; on islands 2 and 5, she can do this twice.
-----• When on islands 3 or 4, she can reroll any number of dice one extra time; on islands 3 and 4, she can reroll two extra times.
If you're on an island and end up with a triple matching that column's number, you take a treasure from the supply and sail that ship back to port, readying it for another journey. The game ends at the end of the round in which someone claims her third treasure, and the player with the most treasures wins; if players tie on treasures, they sum their "sailing points" for the ships still on the water to break the tie.
To provide some relief from the (bad) luck of the dice, each player has a first mate figure. If a player can't move a ship, she can either place her first mate as a scout on an unoccupied island, gaining the use of that power on the subsequent turn, or use her first mate as a thief, placing it on a treasure owned by an opponent with more treasure; if on the next turn you roll any triple, you steal that treasure. (If someone has a thief on one of your treasures and you can't move a ship, you can use your first mate to remove the thief.)
Prototype components
That said, I've played three games of Buccaneer Bones — once with two players and twice with three — and we've yet to have a single use of the first mate. Instead everyone's just rolled and sailed, sometimes catching the wind and racing to the islands with multiple ships and sometimes sputtering one space turn after turn.
Partly that's the nature of the game, as it plays out in 10-15 minutes, and partly that's due to me playing with different players each time (so no one's thinking to try for a first mate to steal a treasure), and partly that's due to sheer dumb luck on my part. In my third game, for example, my first turn put a ship on island #6, giving me a fifth die; my second turn put a ship on island #1, giving me a sixth die, and moving another ship one space; my third and fourth turns were both three pairs, placing three more ships on islands; my fifth turn let me claim one treasure from a middle island; and my sixth turn consisted of a single roll that gave me 1-1-1-6-6-6. Game over.
Sometimes that's how things roll out with dice games like these (although the other two games were much closer). You play for the company and a shared experience of highs and lows — albeit preferably your highs and their lows — as much as for the gameplay itself. You caress the dice, play the odds, take chances, and sometimes strike it rich...
(Thanks to Kris Gould at Wattsalpoag Games, which will have copies of Buccaneer Bones available at Spiel 2013, for providing a prototype copy of this game.)
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