Grublin Games Launch Annoucement

Roleplaying and board games reviews, podcasts, videos and interviews

cornish_smugglerGrublin Games is proud to announce the release of Cornish Smuggler, a strategic board game for 2-4 players. It’ll be launched on Kickstarter on the 22nd May 2013.

Cornish Smuggler, allows players to assume the roles of smugglers in 18th Century Cornwall. Players can buy and sell goods for gold while employing a network of local characters, secret knowledge, hidden locations, bribes, dirty tricks and a healthy dose of cunning to evade the attentions of the customs officers and the other players.

Smuggling in Cornwall wasn’t just an individual enterprise, it was highly organised and involved a staggering variety and number of people in the community. Fisherman and housewives, village carpenters, town clerks, miners, vicars and even witches…they were all in on it!

Cornish Smuggler represents a significant departure from the classical ‘pirate’ themed game. This is a game about dodging the Law, employing the local vicar, building a network, discovering and using secrets, renting out the mayor’s wine cellar, and generally getting rich. It’s a surprisingly accurate historical representation, set in real places in West Cornwall!

In Cornish Smuggler, the choice of which goods to buy is key. As a player, you choose how much to sell your goods for; sell them cheap, and everyone will love you…your reputation and influence in the community will soar…but will you make a profit? With an increased reputation you can transport contraband more easily and evade customs, but to win the game you must have more gold than anyone else.

Customs officers will be constantly searching for contraband goods and their movements are entirely dictated by the actions of the smugglers, but…they can always be bribed! The higher the price you sell your goods for, the stronger the customs forces become…

Players can choose to buy large bulky goods, which are hard to fit on board ship (because goods and ships are all different shapes and sizes) or smaller, more easily transported goods which are worth far less. Also different sized towns offer different prices for goods. Smaller towns offer a lower price, increased reputation and a lower risk of having your goods seized by customs. Larger towns offer better prices and allow smugglers cornish_smuggler_cardsto sell more goods, but doing so is generally much more risky.

Cornish Smuggler is a balanced, fast-paced game that recreates the spirit of the smuggling age. Players are kept guessing about the outcome right through to the very end, just as the designers intended.

This is a game which is based on real things that happened to real people in a real place. All the things that you can do in this game are, to the best of our knowledge, things that people actually did. It’s not about one person sailing ships, commanding crews and firing cannons. It’s about building a network, a community of people, hidden secrets, secret coves, beer cellars, backyard sheds, mineshafts, mysterious signals and a whole host of other things that enable you to smuggle your goods.

We’ve researched what happened and we’ve done the absolute best job we can to capture the feel of the time within a game that is balanced, engaging, fun to play and keeps you guessing all the way through.

We didn’t want to make a game where the theme seemed ‘pasted on’ or the mechanics seemed…overly familiar. We planned that every aspect of this game would complement all the others and, after more than 400 hours of testing, we feel very strongly that we’ve done just that.

Feel free to ask any questions and we’ll do our best to reply quickly and we really appreciate any feedback that you might be able to give.

 

For more information, please contact Grublin via the following:
w: www.grublin.com
tw: www.twitter.com/@GrublinGames
fb: www.facebook.com/GrublinGames
m: P.O. Box 134, Penzance, Cornwall, TR18 2YW, UK

 

Leave a Reply