I've almost bought the Pirates Board Game several times for just that reason. I like the little ships, but it would nice to have a ruleset that was less clunky. And now I'm glad I never did, because WizKids royally screwed the pooch on this one. They actually made it harder to play.

We found a booth at Origins selling it for only $15; I'm pretty sure $20-25 is a more average retail price, so I talked Chris into buying it. You get a playmat, enough ships to support two each for four players, a special captain card for each player, a Davy Jones card, a sea serpent and a kraken, plus some coins and curse tokens.

First problem: the playmat is, as promised, merely a thin plastic mat and not a sturdy board. So it will never stay flat, leaving ripples that make it impossible to get your ships to stay upright. This is a huge problem in a game like Pirates where the orientation and position of your ship matters from turn to turn. Unfortunately, the Pirates Board Game uses the same movement rules, where you have to measure movement using the usual R/W guides. It would have been a lot smarter to design a simplified ruleset that eschewed that fiddly miniatures-style move measuring... maybe something more board gamey with actual movement tiles on the ocean playmat.

Chris and I BOTH managed to snap some ship parts during pre-game assembly. Between the two of us, we've put together tens of those damn little ships, so I wonder if the board game ship cards were made from a cheaper plastic, or cheaply scored... or if we were just supremely unlucky. One nice thing, the included ships are heavily colored to represent the four players. If you're the red player, your ships are obviously red, making them easily identifiable during gameplay.

So after being surprised to learn that moving, attacking, exploring and repairing were all just as clunky as before, we tried to figure out what new rules were added. This is when it got confusing. The premise is that the players are rushing for treasure (as normal) but also fighting undead pirate legend Davy Jones. The game ends once DJ is killed four times, and whomever has the most treasure points wins. As you'll see, this is just about undoable.

Curse coins are mixed in, facedown, alongside the treasure coins. These include coins representing a kraken and sea serpent, as well as four "bad" terrains like Sargasso Sea and Fog Bank. These four events are each placed in the four corners of the mat. When one of your ships randomly finds the Fog Bank curse coin, both of your ships are instantly transported to the Fog Bank area of the map. To escape these Bermuda Triangle-style zones, you have to roll some predetermined impossible feat... like roll under your number of surviving masts. And if you fail, you lose a mast, making it harder and harder to escape.

Escaping one of the zones requires you to roll a number selected by your opponent. That's a one in six chance of getting out. Brilliant.

If a ship loses all of its masts, it returns to your home island so you can suffer through a bunch of Repair turns (one mast at a time). If a ship "dies" in this way, the other ship still stuck in the zone gets to escape for free. Small concession. Prepare to lose turn after turn failing escape rolls and then rebuilding back home.

The sea monsters are a little smarter. When a monster curse coin is revealed, the serpent or kraken is placed on one of six specially marked areas of the board, as determined by die roll. The only placement rule is that the base of the monster needs to completely cover the little numbered icon... so you can angle it in any direction, and if it touches a ship, it insta-kills it.

The big drag to the monsters is that they attack anybody within short range before each player's turn. This can be complete murder, since any given ship is likely to spend several sequential turns stuck by a sea monster.

Then there's the coin that says "Defeat Sea Serpent." Sounds like a Get Out of Jail Free card against a sea monster, right? Wrong. If you pull that curse, your ships have to book it towards the monster and kill it. No instant teleportation either. You have to blow more turns sending your ships in that direction.

But Davy Jones puts them all to shame. If you reveal a Davy Jones coin, he shows up on your island, stops all treasure loading, and you have to swordfight him. You roll a D6 and he rolls a D6. He gets to add +3 to his roll. You get to add +1 or +2. If you win (which is, what, a one in four chance?) you get to push him away to some other island, maybe even the home island of your opponent, yay. If he wins, he eats your treasure, knocks over a mast, and you have to fight him again on your next turn. Now do that four times.

Between all the evil terrain zones, the failed rolls and your ship falling over because it's beached on a crease, you're looking at one seriously over-extended game (the box says 30-60 minutes playtime!) What a mistake. Sure, this set avoids all the complicated keywords and crew interactions, but piling on the pain while steadfastly ignoring opportunities to further simplify things makes this a total failure. The Pirates Board Game should have been an entry-level gateway game, with a taste of the mechanics and the means to hook players into the complex core game system.