Durban - You could be Gunpowder Gertie, or Ruthless Ruth, or One-Eyed Jack or even Short Joe Gold.
“Well, unfortunately Long John Silver was already taken,” says game developer Ronald Schutze from his home in Sheffield Beach as he holds up a card for Captain Skullface.
Parrots feature too: there’s a card for each captain’s parrot, and they’re counted as crew.
The game is called “Pirate Masters” and is available as a board game version and a card game. It involves travelling to islands with names like Emerald and Pearl, in search of jewels, gold coins, a compass or treasure maps.
Masts are useful as the more you have, the more dice you can roll, while more cannons allow you to blast the opposition out the water. You’re continually crossing the chance line (a sort of tropic of Capricorn, if you will).
“Fifty percent of them are good, but then 50% of them are also bad,” Schutze says. All the while there’s the ever present threat of mutinies, taxes, ransoms and being made to walk the plank.
Schutze flashes an escape card. “But use it carefully,” he says. “Sometimes it’s more strategic to walk the plank.”
He devised the game in 2009, while playing cards with his daughter Ana, then about 11 years old.
“She was pestering me for new games. And she was quite into crafts, so we designed a board game and made the board. For the chance cards, we used a pack of old playing cards and drew on them.” He has the original cards. The original ship tokens were moulded out of plasticine.
“It took us a couple of weeks to sort out the rules,” he says. It sounded like they were somewhat fluid at first.
“Then we decided why not make a card game from it. And I took it to a group of friends to see if three and four players could play it successfully,” he said. “And they loved it.”
To get the cards from drawn-on playing cards, Schutze did a lot of the graphics and artwork himself. He also had help from a couple of Pietermaritzburg artists where he was living at the time. His first attempt was using a business card printer which produced 100 packs.
The 100 packs are prized by groups of friends and fans of the game who are now scattered across the world. “There’s a couple in America who always play it when they’ve had a fight, and a group in Australia that go on until 4 in the morning, over much hilarity and banter,” he says.
When Covid hit, he looked to go commercial with a game that had given him many hours of fun.
“I wanted to produce in volume, but the costs are too high. Someone like ‘Game Craft’ in the US comes out at $30 for a pack, plus there’s postage and SA customs. I’d have to sell for R800 a pack and that’s not going to happen. So, I got local quotes and decided to go the crowd-funding route to get the required capital.
“And with a bit of luck, it might even fund an app so I can play the game with friends and family in the States,” he says.
“My dream is to take the game to the Essen spiel. It’s the world’s largest card and board game show. Now for that I’ll wear a proper pirate’s hat,” he says.
To view the campaign go to https://jumpstarter.co.za/.../pirate-masters-card-game/ There’s also a YouTube video outlining the rules of the game.
The Independent on Saturday