Cornish Smuggler

About this board game

Cornish Smuggler is a 2013 board game for 2–5 players, with games lasting around 120 minutes, set in 18th-century Cornwall. Players become smugglers competing to build wealth by buying and selling contraband while avoiding customs officers and outmaneuvering their rivals.

Every sale presents a difficult choice. Sell cheaply to increase your reputation and influence, making it easier to transport goods and evade customs, or demand the best price and maximise your profits. Higher prices, however, strengthen the customs forces, creating greater danger for everyone.

Smuggling is a community effort, so players employ local characters to create a powerful network. Each character has a unique ability, cost, and effect on a smuggler’s reputation. Secrets, dirty tricks, bribes, and hidden locations offer additional ways to protect a growing operation and disrupt the plans of other players.

• Buy goods in different shapes and sizes, then fit them aboard ships.
• Choose between smaller, easier-to-transport goods and bulky cargo that can be worth more.
• Trade in towns where prices, capacity, and risk vary according to their size.
• Move, influence, and bribe customs officers, who remain loyal until another player pays them more.
• Discover secret storehouses to hide goods from customs and protect them from seizure.

Customs officers move in response to players’ actions, and their forces become stronger, more numerous, and harder to bribe as the game progresses. The visible increase in pressure gives every game a clearly defined endpoint while forcing players to adapt their plans.

To win Cornish Smuggler, players must finish with the most gold, balancing clever deals, profitable cargo, reputation, character abilities, and carefully timed evasions. Inspired by real people and events, it presents Cornwall’s smuggling culture against a backdrop of poverty and heavy taxation—more community enterprise than pirate adventure.