Nearly a year ago, a good friend of mine, David Bowman of Certain Affinity, asked if I'd like to visit the office to see what they were working on. Sure! I couldn't report any of it but this was about seeing the creative efforts of a friend, not work. It hadn't yet been released that the company was doing the 360 port of Valve/Turtle Rock's Left for Dead - Zombies are always cool - but I didn't feel compelled to run out and report about it. Zombies, biogenics...*shrug*. Next Bowman pulled out some hexagonal pieces of paper from a box of markers - oh yeah, game design, I remember this! He talked about sitting in a corner play testing, yadda yadda yadda - then he put a controller in my hand.

The sum total of information I was given: This is a pirate game, you are a pirate; you must take and plunder cities; there are three resources; the resources are used to upgrade your ships and later your cities; your ship upgrades are speed, armor and cannon. Then he sat back. No instructions on UI, control scheme - nada. Yarr.

Ok, my pirate home base is a wicked-looking volcano, the map is hexes, I can view the entire map by scrolling, and there's a city to the southwest. Move cursor, press X, go. Hot damn it works. Two games later he was kicking my booty around the map in multiplayer and an hour later I was holding my own. This is the game I have wanted to play on XBLA since it launched and I can't tell a soul. Gah!

Fast forward to Monday at Capcom's Digital Day and oh, what a difference a year makes!

The game has a name! Age of Booty. The core gameplay hasn't changed. You have a ship. Your ship has three properties - canon, armor and speed. Each properties has three levels of strength, but how many total upgrades allowed is dependent upon the scenario or win-condition you set. Most often, we played with a total of 7 allowed upgrades.

A ship's strength can be seen visually by the number of sails it has, the hull; or, in the case of speed, whether or not it has flaming tail pipes. To keep it simple, there are pips - up to three to indicate the overall level of the ship. This is also true of cities - they have "health" - defenses and cannon, and the overall strength of a city can be seen either visually or simply by counting the pips.

Games typically last 5-15 minutes a piece (single or multiplayer); can be as few as two players or as many as 8; allow for 4 players locally (split screen!), 8 through LIVE/PSN; and can contain any combination of user/bot players you'd like. The single-player campaign is a series of 25 maps that initially teaches you how to use the interface, upgrade ships and cities, defeat merchant ships, use curses, plunder natives and cause general mayhem. The multiplayer is... fun.

Bowman was on hand at Capcom, pulling in teams of 4 for multiplayer games. First an itty-bitty map, then a larger one. Having played previously (I also snuck into the office while at SxSW that weekend) I just watched for a while. You know the saying, "Easy to play, hard to master?" Plunder defines this. Every person who sits down immediately gets it. The first map breezes by and clamors for more begin. Hah!

You may be a pirate in Plunder but there's no "I" in pirate... oh, wait. Team play becomes crucial in multi-player matches. The good news? You can see the maps and what resources are where before the game starts. The bad news? If the other side is well-organized, it means nothing. This is where wildcards help to even the score a bit - in Plunder they're known as curses and natives.

Randomly placed on the map will be native villages with bits of resources that make it oh so much easier to upgrade your ship. All you have to do is get to them before someone else does without being sunk, "displace" the natives and pillage the village. (It's easier than it sounds). For every village you take out, another will eventually replace it - eventually. Eventually can be a long time; like 3, sometimes 3 Ѕ minutes.

Also randomly placed on the map are merchant ships. Sad little 1-pip ships that carry curses. Take one out and you get the curse from underneath. (Watch the merchants though, they seem to like to attack you when you're taking out a city and being fired upon by the city and the merchant is harsh, 1-pip or no.)

Curses currently come in 6 flavors including whirlpool, ghost ship, bomb, and stealing resources. Stealing resources from the other side is handy, especially if you're near your piratey volcano and needing those tail pipes. The bomb can be just evil. It causes damage to everything around it which includes a city should you place it there. Using these at just the right time can really turn a game in your favor.

After playing a few more multiplayer games at Capcom what I noticed was the game is less about taking cities and more about holding them. This is where "hard to master" comes into play. There are limited resources available to upgrade and if you don't hold your city, you stop gaining them. If you don't upgrade your city, you will lose your city. However, if you don't upgrade your ship, taking cities quickly becomes difficult. The only way to effectively manage this conundrum is to work as a team, but it is second nature to want to put cannon on the ship! Give me a stronger hull! What do you mean I've lost the city and every upgrade I put into it? AGAIN.

The last little tidbit on our 3-hour tour (was Gilligan a pirate?) was the map editor. It's the same editor used by the developers to create their maps and is as easy as they come. Open a new map; you've got an ocean of hexes. Choose land type and plop it down. Add cities, pirate home bases, native villages and go. When you play, you set the number of ships, merchants, etc. and the win condition.

When the maps go viral is when this becomes beautiful. In the profile for the game you'll see the last 50 maps you've played, even if that map was from your friend's machine. There are plans in place for most popular, most successful, most everything-you-can-think-of map rankings.

If it sounds like my writer's coffers floweth over with praise, it is because Age of Booty is simply that fun. I have no doubt I will be playing this with my kids. But this is the game that I suspect will finally convince my curmudgeonly nee churlish father deign to pick up a controller and give it a try. Due this summer on XBLA, PSN and PC - this is the casual game that won't be casual and we've all been waiting for.