Pirate Clash
- Board's Eye View
- May 2
- 2 min read
Designed by Oscar Romero, with art by Alex Santalo, Pirate Clash is a lively speed matching game for children. It's essentially a variant on the traditional card game Snap! and it takes 2-5 players.
There are three types of treasure cards, showing gold, jewels or a sword. For each game you lay out one fewer card of each type than there are players; so in a four-player game you lay out three copies of each of the three treasure types. The shuffled deck of 69 cards is dealt out face down to all players so that each has an equal pile of cards. Players then take turns to flip a card from their pile.
As soon as a card is revealed that shows a pirate looking for a loot type on the table (the burly pirate with an empty treasure chest, the cabin boy with a wooden sword or the pirate captain coveting jewels) players must rush to be the first to grab the loot and add it to their stash. Some cards tho' will show the cabin boy, burly pirate or captain already clutching their treasures. Other cards have a parrot concealed in the picture. In either of these situations, players should not be making a grab for loot... If you grab for the loot by mistake, you forfeit one of the cards you've previously won.
This all makes for a fun set collection game where the winner is the first to collect a set of all three treasure cards. If players are all similarly quick- or slow-witted, it's a game that will swing back and forth because when all of a particular treasure type have been claimed you'll be stealing treasure cards from each other.
The problem with most speed matching card games is that the act of grabbing isn't usually very kind to the cards: they soon get bent or torn. Publishers Magicbox have neatly gotten around this problem by including in the box a foam rubber treasure chest. It's this rather than the cards themselves that the players have to grab, so even the most exuberant children should be able to play Pirate Clash without risk to the components.
