I took a good look at Smugglers recently because I was reading the rules for a game called King of Chicago. I started designing Smugglers more than ten years ago and had never really gotten anywhere with. I liked the idea of having routes and influence and stuff, but didn’t really know what to do with it.
The main problem with Smugglers was that I had just been playing Puerto Rico a LOT. So Smugglers was almost a reskin with some added rules. Now I’m looking more at the theme and how to make the rules follow that.
Much more about this later!
Look at Smugglers here.