Chris and I both glommed onto it last year, Mike and the rest less so, but still willing to play it. And after the convention ended, none of us ever played it again.

Until I, more or less randomly, brought it into work last week. Now I'm feeling re-Piratized. In the year since it debuted, WizKids has released two additional sets, Of the Crimson Coast and Of the Revolution. And I was happy to note that all three sets had been revised to include a much clarified rulebook. This weekend I picked up a handful of new packs, mixed them with my original Origins 2004 set (that promo ship they gave away is awful!) and now I have a 30-point fleet for each nation. Except America, for some reason I have been unable to pull a single American ship. Shrug.

Pirates is about as much of a miniatures game as I can stand. A couple years ago, I was desperate to get into a miniatures game. Since I was mad into Doomtown at the time, I bought heavy into Great Rail Wars. I built an awesome miniature western town, painted up tons of lead minis... and then never really played the game. I think Mike, Scott and I played a full game maybe once.

My problem is that, as much as I love the visceral, tangible tiny world, the rules are always complicated and non-intuitive. I suppose if I dedicated all my time to memorizing the manual, things would have gone smoother, but, as a casual newbie, 2/3 of any attempt at playing was spent flipping through the rulebooks. I never even thought seriously about GRW's later rules that allowed for trains and horses and other vehicles; I could only barely control a couple of posses confronting each other in a burned-out frontier street.

When Mage Knight first hit, I thought that would be my solution. Instead of the usual wholly independent lead figures, MK showed up with this neat little clicking dial built into each figure's base. So attack and defense stats were highly obvious for each piece, and the clicking could simulate the character's skills fluctuating over time.

So I bought into that... only to realize that MK had inherited the same old problem: list after list of additional abilities that you needed nearby. Sure, they color-coded them so you can find them easier, but I still found it a game breaker, especially when you find out that a red block over the attack number means something different than a red block over the defense number. What sealed the deal was that Mage Knight's gameworld was yet another bland fantasy setting, teeming with elves and trolls etc. I recently unloaded my entire MK collection (not much, about 100 figures) on eBay.

WizKids then applied the Mage Knight clicky base to the superheroes of DC and Marvel Comics, which of course is a theming I can definitely get behind. The color problem persisted, so I never bought more than a Marvel starter and some DC ToyFare exclusives. Never been played.

Clearly the struggle for me is finding a vibrant visual reality with a simple, fast, easy to parse ruleset. And Pirates is about as close as anything that wasn't a video game.

The ships look cool, you get to disassemble them as they take cannonball hits... and the newer sets introduced cute tiny forts to build, and the ability to set ships on fire at sea, including great billowing smoke clouds that you can stick to the ailing ship. It scales nice, so you can field a small 30 point fleet or amp up that build cap for a longer game. Special abilities - always the fun-killer in other games I've tried - are all laid out on the punchcards. Consulting the rulebook never goes much farther than looking down at the cards sitting in front of you.

The punchcards hold all the stats, and you can put the ships back in them for storage. They're made like credit card plastic.

The only fiddly bit is found in almost every game of this type... the inexact nature of movement and piece placement. When a ship leaves the table so you can apply damage (by tearing off one of the masts) or as you arrange the move path, players simply aren't going to always put the ship back down with precision. A millimeter here or there can mean the difference is whether one ship is in range of another's cannons. That always irks me a little bit, so I have to consider Pirates a loose game in that regard. I'd hate to play it at the tournament level, because I can't imagine myself accepting floating pieces like that with a championship on the line.

One major plus to Pirates is that it's cheap. You don't have to invest near the amount of money to come up with a playable fleet that you need to build a working deck in a CCG. Fleet building is also much easier than deckbuilding... I could easily see novice gamers learning to customize from available parts; you're only adding up piece values, after all.

So today I was wondering what other similar punchcard type games WizKids could create. WWII sea battles would be awesome, and we're just now hitting the time that you're allowed to fictionalize WWII to the extent that we fictionalize historical concepts like "pirates" and the "old west." And keeping WWII restricted to the war at sea pretty much neutralizes the nastier elements of the past: we'd be able to avoid the atomic bomb and the Final Solution in trade for Pearl Harbor and kamikaze pilots. Maybe even allow some kind of sidebar minigame with dogfighting planes... WizKids tried doing air battles in a semi-WWII fashion with Crimson Skies (another clicky base game, and yes, I bought that one too) but it is dead, judging from its placement on the WizKids website (hidden under "Other Games).

A revamped Car Wars would be much cooler under the Pirates-style presentation. 3D cars with removable hoods, roofs, doors, tires (clean-painted on one side, damaged on the other). Attachable weapon sets. Crap, drop the Car Wars brand (Steve Jackson has relaunched it five too many times already anyway) and work up a Grand Theft Auto game. Instant riches.

Let's step away from vehicle-based games and imagine a 3D tabletop Katamari Damacy game. Grabbable items are scattered about the table and when players roll them up they get slotted into an open plug on the katamari ball. With all the junk you can collect in Katamari Damacy, it's a great fit for the random booster design.

Huh. Maybe I should get on that.