Since Corsair’s return, the Fisherman’s Guild has been taking on more of a distinctly piratical flavour. As Corsair’s first mate, Sakana has been deeply involved in this change, losing some of his free spirit and love for the game in favour of, uh, pirate flags and moody expressions.

Running quickly over his stats, Sakana is very close to his original version, with the only exception being his INF stat which is now 1/3 instead of 2/4. I wonder if there’s a reason for that? He’s also kept his 2” melee zone, which adds another one of those to the already 2” melee zone heavy Fisherman’s Guild.

Sakana’s Playbook has elements of a classic Fisherman Playbook but with a couple of interesting exceptions. His momentous Dodge is on column 2, while his Tackle is on column 1, a reversal of how those results often appear in Fish. This means he can super reliably Tackle the ball from enemy players, and he can pretty reliably Dodge around and generate momentum. His other momentous results are a GB symbol on column 3, a Push/Dodge result on column 4, and a double Push on column 5. This more Push focused Playbook (compared to ‘normal’ Fishermen) is representative of his more piratical, aggressive playstyle, much like Corsair. He also has 2 damage on three hits, and 3 damage on five hits. With the large number of gang-ups Fishermen can stack, this actually allows him to put quite a bit of damage out on the enemy team, albeit non-momentously.

We did mention that momentous GB symbol on column 3, and both of his Character Plays trigger on this result. Column 3 is very achievable, especially since Sakana has kept (spoiler alert) Anatomical Precision from his original version. This is particularly sweet since both of these Character Plays are new, and unique and GOOOOOOOD.

Sakana’s first Character Play is called Fancy Footwork, and this allows him to steal the ball-marker from an enemy player within 4”. This provides another way of getting the ball from the enemy team, in conjunction with Siren and Corsair, it gets very, very hard for the opposing team to keep the ball safe from the predatory Fishermen! This rule also further represents the more piratical nature of Veteran Sakana, he’s all about theft and living his best pirate life (Burgler Bill fans may be interested to know the original name in playtest for this rule was ‘I’ll Have That!’).

The second Character Play on Sakana’s card is another super interesting one, it’s called Raise the Black Flag, and further represents Sakana stealing from the enemy team. It allows him to inflict a -2”/-2” MOV penalty on an enemy model within 6” of him, and correspondingly give +2”/+2” to a friendly model within 6”. This gives an enormous amount of flexibility, handing out an additional 2” of movement to any friendly model within 6” can push several Fishermen models into truly silly levels of speed, Shark or Siren beginning an activation with a 9” Jog seems pretty good, for instance. The fact that Sakana ‘steals’ the speed from an enemy model to benefit his friends is just gravy, making it even more difficult for the enemy team to counter the suddenly much faster Fishermen team.

Perkins, I Told You I’m Not Making a Pirate Pun

[Editor’s Note: no need to get p-IRATE]