Pirate board-game creator rolls the dice on a jolly good pastime

Darren Gendron sees an opportunity — a niche, really — that he thinks he can seize. It involves board games. It involves Gendron becoming a part of your Wednesday game night, entering the collective cultural consciousness through the living room. It involves pirates.

“We had seen a few games involving pirates before,” explains Gendron, who lives in Columbia. He twirls, as one does, his handlebar mustache. “WizKids had come out with this ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ game, and it was fun, but you had to build these ships out of punch cards and they really didn’t hold up well. And we found some games that upheld the sea-attacking aspect of pirates but didn’t touch nearly enough on the land-attacking aspects.” He pauses. “That, of course, was really just a huge problem.”

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(Bill O'Leary/WASHINGTON POST) - Darren Gendron, left, Alex Chambers and Ralph Pripstein play Scurvy Dogs, which Gendron, of Columbia, is developing. He hopes micro-investing Web site Kickstarter will back his effort.

Gendron, who had never designed a board game, has just designed Scurvy Dogs: Pirates and Privateers Sail the Seas.

The board game lexicon is already quite full. There are Monopoly and Risk, Scrabble and Sorry! Someone is always sketching a sock that looks like a hockey stick in Pictionary; Miss Scarlet is always roaming the conservatory, wielding a lead pipe. Old favorites seep into our collective consciousness that way. (If the idea of millions of Americans curling up in front of a game called Scurvy Dogs sounds unlikely, consider how weird it is that we have spent the past 60-odd years metaphorically prowling around an old English manor, carrying plumbing.)

Once the purview of larger game companies, such as Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, game design is opening itself up to passionate, niche hobbyists.

Gendron wants to self-publish his game, and he estimates that he’ll need $20,000 to get it off the ground, through a micro­investing site called Kickstarter.

He has one week left to raise the money that might allow him to achieve the dream.

The goal: Stay alive

“What are you at, plus three?” Gendron asks Alex Chambers, his friend and Scurvy Dog guinea pig.

“Plus four,” Chambers says. He’s so smug about that four. “I have all of these cannons, and the grapeshot.”

“Just remember, you can only go so high, or else the Spanish Armada will come and get you.”

Gendron holds up a piece of notebook paper that has “Spanish Armada” written on it. He waggles it threateningly in Chambers’s face. In this prototype of the game, gold coins are represented by pennies. The sea is a piece of painted whiteboard. The pirates, however, are hand-painted miniatures of Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Anne Bonny and others. An aspiring designer of pirate games must have standards.

To Chambers’s right, Ralph Pripstein is not focusing on cannons because he has just acquired two Secret Treasure Maps. Nobody knows this. That’s why they’re secret. If Pripstein can get to an island and roll successfully for treasure, the move will win him 40 gold pieces and end the game.

It is the geeking hour. It’s a Wednesday evening, and Gen­dron, Chambers and Pripstein are huddled around Gendron’s dining room table. For months they have been meeting here, once a week, stress testing the game like those mechanical butts in Ikea that stress test the Poang chair. Their goal is to take the game through every possible permutation — to account for events that could end it too fast, or drag it on too long, and to figure out what would happen if two people landed on the same island.