Sharpen your cutlasses, freshen your flints, and make sure your powder is dry! This week, the Goonhammer Historicals team takes a look at Firelock Games’ new adventure skirmish game set in the golden age of piracy: Port Royal!
In 1655, Jamaica was captured by British forces, firmly wresting control of the island from the Spanish, who had held it since the 1500s. Almost immediately, the colonial governor’s intentionally lax taxation and law enforcement policies turned the town of Port Royal into a haven for buccaneers, ostensibly to act as a defense against any attempt by the Spanish to retake the island. This led to the Jamaican town becoming known far as wide as “the wickedest city on earth.” In 1668, Henry Morgan’s famous raid on the Spanish town of Portobello brought plunder back to Port Royal worth over seven times the value of the entire colony of Jamaica’s annual sugarcane trade – sugarcane being the colony’s chief export at the time. Though many buccaneers (including Morgan himself) ultimately ended up parlaying their wealth into land and becoming more settled, the town still had a reputation as a wretched hive of scum and villainy – albeit a fabulously wealthy one!
All this changed on the 7th of June, 1692, when Port Royal was struck by a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Two thirds of the town sank into the harbor and most of the rest was badly damaged. What followed was a mad scramble to loot one of the wealthiest places in the New World.
This is the setting behind Port Royal, Firelock Games’ newest release. It is designed to be a warband-scale skirmish game along the lines of Mordheim or Necromunda, where each player takes control of a daring band of anywhere from three to 10 ne’er-do-wells and dukes it out to score as much loot as possible. This game is a million percent up my alley, so I have been eagerly anticipating its release since Firelock’s Mike Tuñez first teased in during our interview at GenCon 2023.
Disclaimer: Firelock Games provided us an advance copy of the game for review purposes. That said, if you think for a moment that I hadn’t already backed this one to the hilt on Kickstarter the second it was available, you would be sorely mistaken. This one falls squarely into my “shut up and take my money!” territory.
The Basics
The game uses D10s for task and conflict resolution, with the player needing to roll over a certain target number to score a hit. Because each character’s attributes typically set the target number, lower scores are better. So a character with a Resolve of 4 passes (say) a Fatigue test on a 4+, though situational modifiers might change this. For players of Blood & Plunder, this whole system will feel very familiar.
Like most games of this type, each player picks a faction and begins constructing their warband (called a “company” in the game). The game offers seven different factions, each of which has four types of officers, four types of “crew,” and a few faction-specific extra capabilities. Officers, as you’d expect, are your leaders. They’re a little more skilled, a little tougher, and gain experience a little faster. There are limits to how many of each type of officer you can take in your company. Crew, on the other hand, are your basic troops. More expendable, they only gain experience as a group, and this is slower than for officers. Each type of officer or crew has a certain cost (in pieces-of-eight, or just “pieces” in the game’s parlance) and comes with no gear whatsoever. Each weapon or item of equipment also costs one “piece,” so building and equipping your force is incredibly simple.
The suggested cost for a starting company is 30 pieces, so with that in mind we set about creating a couple of companies to try things out. I went with an English force (representing forces of the Crown trying to restore order) and my opponent put together a company of French buccaneers looking for easy plunder. With that out of the way, it was time to play! My friend Cody took the reins of the English, and my long-time Blood & Plunder nemesis Chris played his French with his usual verve and dastardliness. That left me to act as a sort of referee to keep track of the action and furiously look things up as we played.
Playing the Game
As a small-scale skirmish game, Port Royal is intended to be played on just a 2′ x 2′ area, which makes it great for kitchen-table gaming. The rulebook has some suggestions for how much of your table should be terrain, and again if you are already a Blood & Plunder player you probably already have everything you need. Though many of those structures that didn’t sink into the sea were damaged, we went with mostly intact buildings, perhaps an area just at the edge of town and thus spared the worst of the destruction.
An interesting aspect of Port Royal’s game setup phase is that after you’ve placed your terrain and taken turns placing five Plunder tokens (objectives everyone’s trying to get) you roll randomly for one of 10 scenario variations and one of five deployment styles. As such, even though the basic scenario is the same, you have lots of replayability. For our introductory game we ended up with the “Low Visibility” variation (which would apply a penalty to spotting/shooting/reacting outside 8″) and the “Split Party” deployment (which led to both sides splitting their company in two and taking turns deploying each half anywhere on the board that was at least 4” away from any Plunder tokens and at least 8” from any opponent’s characters). Already, there was some nice complexity developing…
8 June, 1692
At first light, our party set out from our barracks and made haste for Port Royal, having been informed by a runner from the garrison that looting and violence had begun there. Myself, Lieutenant Baxter, and three of the men of the regiment comprised our party. Along the way we encountered Private Wells, a dazed militiaman local to the area, whom I commanded to guide us. The morning fog was quite heavy, obscuring our vision and distorting sound in a most eerie manner. As we approached the outskirts of that wretched place, I dispatched Corporals Phelps and Collins to accompany Lieutenant Baxter, whilst Privates Danforth and Wells were with me. Splitting up, we cautiously pressed forward…
– Captain Julian Montfort
Turn Order, Actions, and the Fortune Economy
At the beginning of each turn, players each get 6 Fortune tokens. These can be used in a variety of ways during the turn (and cannot be carried over between turns), most importantly to give characters additional actions or to re-roll horrible results. But they can also be used in a bid to help secure the turn order. During the Initiative Phase at the beginning of each turn, players can secretly bid up to 3 of their Fortune tokens for an advantage on the initiative test. This produces a delicious push-pull between wanting to give yourself an advantage by acting first, or carefully husbanding your resources to be able to do more stuff when you actually get to go. And of course since the bid is secret, any Fortune you spend may not help if our opponent spends an equal amount. And of course there are the vagaries of random chance to confound your best-laid plans.
Hilariously, if the initial test results in a tie, a random event is triggered. This happened at the beginning of our very first turn of the game, and the result on the table came up as “Wild Beasts.” This in turn resulted in some cantankerous animal being placed in contact with a random character and making an immediate attack. One of the stretch goals unlocked in Firelock’s Port Royal Kickstarter campaign was a set of 3D printable STLs for crocodiles for this very purpose, but those haven’t been delivered yet so we just used the next best thing we had on hand. So before anybody gets to do anything, comedy gold has already been struck:
Capitaine Lestrade: “Attention a la vache!”
Emile: “Quoi?”
Capitaine Lestrade (pointing wildly): “La vache! Atten…”
La Vache: “MOOOOOOO!”
Emile: “Aiiieeee, mon aine!”
Once initiative has been resolved, the first player activates each of his characters, with each activation conferring two actions. Excess Fatigue on a character can reduce your actions and Fortune tokens can be spent to add more, but no character can act more than three times in a single activation.
But lest you think this is a clear case of IGOUGO, Firelock has done something I really like here by incorporating the concept of Reactions – once during an opponent character’s activation, any of your characters who has line of sight to the activating character can attempt to perform a single action of their own as a reaction. There are a few caveats here; first, the reacting character must pass an Experience check, so reactions aren’t guaranteed. Second, reactions can only happen after a provoking action by the activating character (because certain actions such as concealing oneself cannot be reacted to).
As a veteran Infinity player (in which similar reaction mechanics are a cornerstone of the game’s design), this is fantastic! Nothing is worse than having your entire force stand around like dopes while your opponent clowns on them. But in Port Royal, you are always engaged with what’s happening, even in your opponent’s turn. This gives the game much more of a back-and-forth feel, and as we shall see leads to some hilarious interactions that really bring fun narrative out of the system’s rules mechanisms.
The Reaction system also ties back into the Fortune token economy, as even if you are going first in the turn you might want to save a token or two if you anticipate needing to take important reactions. Decisions, decisions!
Another interesting innovation is the move from simple checks versus character attributes using a single D10 (still used for basic, non-interactive tests) to a 3D10 system for opposed rolls. Each character is still rolling for their own target number (with appropriate situational modifiers), but now you’re looking to see who can not just generate a success but rather more successes than their opponent. This smooths out the statistical curve and makes the game a bit less swingy.
Further, the use of a “primary die” (one of your three dice should be a different color or size) provides the possibility for critical success or failure – if your primary die is a 1 or a 10, this has resulted in a critical failure or success respectively. Different tests treat criticals differently, but one of the first rolls of our game saw a critical failure in a Shoot test. By the rules as written a character who is “engaged” (i.e. in hand-to-hand combat with an opponent) can’t be targeted – you want to avoid friendly fire after all! But we all decided that since Cody’s British soldier was firing through the mist into a fight that involved no friendly troops, we’d allow it. Of course he critically failed the roll and we all immediately decided that could only mean that he had hit the cow! Worse, he managed to roll sufficiently well on the Damage test to put it out of action, inadvertently coming to poor Emile’s rescue!
Corporal Phelps moved slowly through the yard at the rear of the house. Suddenly, he heard a terrible sound, an unholy combination of both scream and bellow, a noise as if straight from hell itself. Panicked, he leaned against a tree for support and leveled his musket at the barely-glimpsed shape he could only just make out through the mist. The report of his musket was deafening in his ears.
Weapons and Gear
As mentioned, all gear purchased for your company in Port Royal has the same cost, one piece-of-eight each. So outfitting your Captain with two pistols and a sword would have a cost of three. Each faction has a list of common and rare gear available to it, and while you can only buy 3 items of rare gear when creating your company, as you explore and plunder the ruins of Port Royal you can gain more.
The restrictions associated with gear are pretty straightforward – only one item with the “two handed” keyword, and you can only carry three of any other items. Though there are only five different shooting weapons and a dozen or so melee weapons, the use of ranges, damage modifiers, and keywords means there are some important distinctions between them. This is actually one of my minor quibbles about Port Royal (and Blood & Plunder before it): there’s so freaking many keywords! What’s the difference between “Drilled” and “Expertly Drilled” again? Oh, my sword has “Parry,” remind me, what does that do? The online army builder for Blood & Plunder has a helpful feature that will list out all of the special rules that apply to a force, its ships, or its weapons on the roster, but that doesn’t exist for Port Royal yet. You can do yourself a favor by printing out the two pages in Chapter 7 where all the weapon characteristic keywords are defined.
On the plus side, you can do some fun and surprisingly complicated stuff with this relatively simple system once you get the hang of it. We had combats with multiple participants, wielding multiple kinds of weapons, dual-wielding, reactions in combat, etc. It made for some really funny and engaging play. For example, like Blood & Plunder, Port Royal imposes a penalty on characters repeating Shoot or Fight actions within a single activation. However, if you are dual-wielding you can ignore this penalty, which gives you a reason to take both a sword and a pistol (or sword and dagger, or even two swords!).
Corporal Collins discharged his musket at close range as the Frenchman came around the corner. The hasty shot flew wide and the enemy sailor charged in with his boarding axe held high. Collins parried the attack and drew a sigh of relief as Lieutenant Baxter stepped up to his aid. Another Frenchman, this one looking like an officer stepped into the fray, his sword flashing from across the top of the nearby rain-barrel between them. Collins thought he had escaped again, but did not see the French officer quickly reverse his pistol in hand and strike out with its butt. The bludgeon caught Collins just above the left temple and knocked him out cold.
Importantly, melee weapons also have ranges of anywhere from 1″ to 3″, which makes accommodating fights on tables with lots of scatter terrain easier. Nothing is as maddening as trying to carefully measure and having to get posed models in base-to-base contact while still accounting for terrain. In Port Royal, close counts, which is a great aspect of the rules that I wish more systems used!
Campaign Mode
While one-off games of Port Royal are an entertaining way to spend an evening in and of themselves, the real magic of these kinds of games comes from campaign play, where games are linked together to represent the continuing adventures of your dudes. The campaigns section of the book contains all of the stuff you would expect – gaining loot, finding gear, learning new skills, recruiting new members (or replacing those who’ve been lost), etc.
Any model that was removed as a casualty during the game itself must check for injury. For basic crew members, this is just a simple “did they die?” check. For officers the table has a lot more options, which means your officer characters can build up an impressive array of battle scars over their tenure. For instance, in our game the British side lost two Soldiers, one Militiaman, and Lieutenant Baxter as casualties (a bloody day, to be sure). But all of the basic crew (the Soldiers and Militiaman) recovered without issue, merely having been knocked unconscious. When checking for Lt. Baxter (an officer), his result came up as “Lost,” meaning he will miss the next game then make an Experience check afterwards to see if he returns. Bloodied, unconscious, and left for dead by his comrades, poor Baxter is stumbling around the ruins for a while. Side note – this roll gets easier after each game, but if it’s ever a critical failure then the unfortunate Lieutenant Baxter disappears and is never seen again!
The French casualties were comparatively light, with only a Sailor (Emile) and Capitaine Lestrade being treated as casualties. Unfortunately, Emile was straight up killed (maybe for the best, he never would have lived down getting attacked by a cow). Lestrade recovered and actually gained the “Vendetta” skill against Captain Montfort’s warband. Considering that Phelps shot him in the back, this reaction is perhaps unsurprising. Here again Port Royal does a great job of producing narrative, which is something I absolutely love! I can just imagine Lestrade seething and cursing (in his most colorfully terrible French accent) Montfort’s utter lack of gentlemanly leadership and the execrable underhandedness with which he allows the troops under his command to operate.
When it comes to money, again there is some random chance. Having more Plunder Tokens in your possession at the end of the game helps, but in our situation the single chest held by Captain Montfort at the end of the game had more money in it (25 Pieces) than the sum total of the three chests recovered by the French (20 Pieces). During the “Exploration Phase” (which gives each warband an opportunity to find something cool) the British only found a measly 4 additional Pieces, but Lestrade’s company happened across an important official whom they have taken for ransom (as is appropriate for opportunistic buccaneers). This means they’ll start their next game with what is effectively a mobile Plunder Token worth a huge ransom (4D10 Pieces) to whoever holds him at the end of that game. Spicy!
Campaign mode also includes rules for company upkeep, with the hilarious hitch that if you can’t pay it there’s a chance you company mutinies! This can result in the loss of crew members or (in extreme cases) the loss of a company’s commander. The larger your company, the more expensive it is to keep up, which means that bigger companies are going to be able to spend less of their loot tricking out their troops with gear because they’re going to want to keep a reserve to prevent mutiny. Or not, I’m not their dad, if they want to run the risk that’s half the fun, right?
It’s also worth noting that while officers get XP individually, crew members do it as groups. Further, as your crew types get more skills, recruiting new members of that type gets more expensive. This is a nice check on the “runaway progress” that can trouble a lot of these kinds of games – those situations where as one warband starts to win it gets easier for them to keep winning? This is one of my least favorite parts of Necromunda, and I feel like the team at Firelock have done a nice job of building in some checks and balances to prevent that from happening. As a warband gets bigger and gains more experience, it’s going to take a lot more to just meet their basic upkeep. Further, smaller or less skilled warbands gain an experience bonus for every member every time they go up against a company whose “Infamy Score” exceeds their own by 5 or more.
It’s hard to know without playing through a full-on campaign across multiple turns and with multiple players, but even from going through a single postgame phase I can already see some of those balancing factors at work. Just the fact that even though the French “won” the scenario, the British ended up with no deaths and more cash is intriguing. The French will have the edge in experience gained, but the overall power level of the forces after the first match still feels very even.
Other Goodies
It is an unfortunate fact of life among historical games that sometimes you just can’t find an opponent who is interested in your specific historical period. As a result, the best historical games are those that support solo play, and Port Royal has an entire section on playing the game by yourself.
The solo rules are very clever and change the behavior of the opposing force according to the relative number of Strike Points between the player-controlled and NPC forces; if the human player has more, the AI’s actions are more aggressive. If the AI is ahead, it is more inclined to move tactically to preserve its lead, or even retreat to pull its forces (and captured loot) out of harm’s way. Action types are taken according to card draws – you can use the face cards from a standard deck of playing cards, but Firelock makes a deck to go along with Port Royal that has cards for solo play. These have the movement/action priorities and any special abilities printed right on them for ease of play. The deck also includes cards to randomize events, deployment, and scenario options and is worth picking up when you buy the game.
When it comes to Fortune Points, the AI doesn’t use them. Instead, certain cards offer special rules, such as an additional action or re-rolls on attempted actions. This is cool because while it doesn’t have quite the same ruthless decision-making as a human opponent, it definitely introduces some uncertainty into what the AI is going to do (or be able to do). I haven’t had too much of an opportunity (OpFortunity?) to mess around with this system yet, but the little I have tinkered with it has impressed me. And the fact that it’s right in the base game and not gated into a supplement is fantastic.
This section also includes rules for multi-player team games, free-for-all scenarios, and co-op games. The rules modifications for free-for-all games are interesting, and largely center around figuring out who is going to get to react to any opponent character’s activation. It introduces a little bit more die-rolling (making the Reaction test an opposed roll), but it’s much more fair in my opinion than letting everyone react all the time. I think that would be too lethal for the active player.
Similarly, the rules for co-op play are essentially a team game run against a force played using the AI rules from the solo play section. This is kind of a fun way to do things, as sometimes you want to play with your friends rather than against them. I’m glad that Firelock included this as an explicitly supported option.
Overall Impressions
There are a few aspects of the game I find a little frustrating, but overall they’re pretty minor. I found the layout of the rulebook slightly problematic from the sense that the turn order and phases and opposed resolution stuff is in one chapter but all the actions (which take place in one of the phases) is in another. This led to a lot of back and forth as we got the hang of how things worked. I’d almost rather they put this all into one bigger chapter with the actions stuff in the middle.
Similarly, there are a few edge cases that I feel add complication that is probably unnecessary. For instance, if you make multiple “Move” actions during your activation, each one past the first is penalized an additional, cumulative 1″. So 4″ for your first move, 3″ for your second, 2″ for your third. The minimum is 2″, which really only matters if you’re in rough terrain (where you pay a 1″ penalty for each move). This is something that’s very clearly written in the book but incredibly easy to forget in play (which we did all throughout our first game).
As mentioned above, the proliferation of weapons traits and character skills can be a little daunting at first. Each one individually is very easy, but remembering a) that they exist, and b) when they apply is just an extra bit of thought you’ll need to put in to make sure you’re getting the most out of the game. The rulebook includes a good set of quick-reference sheets in the back, but in my mind you’ll probably want to print out the pages on weapon traits and character skills to have them handy for easy reference.
Finally, given the nautical bones of Blood & Plunder (and the fact that two-thirds of the town of Port Royal ended up at least partially submerged after the earthquake), I was disappointed to not see any amphibious rules here. Even if you want to leave off ships, something like rules for crewing rowboats would have really elevated things to the next level. I really hope we see something like this in an update or download in the near future.
But these criticisms are very slight compared to the massive amount of stuff there is to absolutely love about this game. First things first, I can’t say enough about how much I like that they have incorporated the concept of reactions into the game. Though not automatic, they pose a real sense of risk to the game and lead to some great interactions. At one point, Cody’s Lieutenant Baxter was engaged in a furious close-range shootout with Chris’ Capitaine Lestrade. You could really imagine these guys ducking in and out of doorways or over barrels, furiously dumping powder and ramming shot into their pistols as they hurled insults at each other. When the question of “what is your reaction?” to a guy in your face is “I reload my pistol,” something magical is going on. As I said, this game delivers narrative in spades, which is something I am always looking for in a tabletop game.
I am also a huge fan of the way that the action economy and the Fortune tokens play off one another. I love games that give players a limited meta-currency and provide them with tough choices for how to spend it, and this system delivers that well in my opinion. The difficult decision of when and how to spend those precious, limited tokens is just icing on a very well constructed cake.
And when you wrap it all up with the additional baked-in support for solo, co-op, and free-for-all game play, I think that Firelock have really outdone themselves. Finally, the thought paid to long-term balance between forces as a campaign progresses looks to handily avoid some of the worst pitfalls of earlier incarnations of this type of game (and campaign play in general). Again, great job!
Parting Shots
One of the real strengths of Port Royal is that while the deluxe boxed set comes with 15 miniatures (12 of which you can get as Firelock’s plastic Sailors box and three of which are exclusive to Port Royal), if you already have a force for Blood & Plunder (and why wouldn’t you, it’s a great game!) chances are good you have enough miniatures on hand to start playing Port Royal immediately! There are even rules in the Appendix for creating new Port Royal companies from Blood & Plunder factions. And if do you already play Blood & Plunder, do yourself a favor and pick up Port Royal immediately. It’s a great complement to its bigger sibling.
As always, I want to give a shout out to my gaming buddies Chris and Cody, who jumped into the game and were willing to put up with learning the rules by playing it (and with me pausing to look things up constantly). They both provided admirable character to their characters and we had a great time as a result.
If you are interested in Port Royal, it is shipping to its Kickstarter backers now and is available for pre-order on Firelock’s website. The boxed set (which includes the rulebook, 15 miniatures, dice, tokens, measuring templates, a paper playmat, and some really nice punchboard terrain for broken walls and ruined buildings) retails for $99.00. If you already have miniatures and terrain, the physical rulebook retails for just $35.00. Either one is a steal, in my opinion.
But then again, stealing is just another form of looting, so head on over to Firelock’s website and start your path to plundering adventure!
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