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Adventures in bibliopiracy, December 6, 2020Captain Graybeard’s Plunder neatly inverts the adage that history is written by the victors; here, fiction is remixed by the losers. As a pirate captain whose career was ended by complacency (indirectly) and a royal galleon (rather more directly), you take solace in your retirement by dreaming up how things might have gone differently if your ship, crew, and, er, hand-replacing prosthetic had been up to snuff. The gag is that rather than inventing these upgrades whole cloth, instead you turn to your character’s ample library for inspiration, so that, for example, you might imagine a rematch where your crew are veterans straight out of Treasure Island, or where you boast Captain Hook’s eponymous pointy bit atop your stump.
That’s all there is to it, really: this isn’t a puzzle, as any combination of choices appears to lead to a satisfying bout of vengeance, plus there are only three choices for each of the three variables so you’ll run through all of them in only a couple of replats. A grounded character-study or bit of world-building this is not – the captain is your stereotypical pirate save for his love of literature (though pirates do love their arrs, so I suppose it’s not too surprising he got stuck on reading and writing), and the fact that you can plunder from Peter Pan makes the timeline quite suspect!
Fortunately, CGP has charm in spades and that’s what carries it through. The writing ably inhabits the pirate milieu, and effectively conveys both the joys of buccaneering and the transporting power of a good book. The presentation is splendid too, with each of the books you steal from rendered in its own slightly-different cursive font, which carries through into the battle re-creation to make it clear how you’ve stitched everything together. There aren’t major variations depending on your choices, but though they’re small, the responsiveness is nonetheless satisfying, as you get to feel like your choice of Captain Nemo’s sub, for example, was an especially smart one. CGP knows what it’s about, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and made me realize it’s been too long since I’ve reread Moby Dick, which is a lot to accomplish for a ten-minute game!