A board represents a town divided into four sections, each with four or five specific locations. In every round, tokens are randomly pulled from a bag and placed at their corresponding locations on the board. You have a few rounds to jockey for position before those tokens are collected for scoring, using workers of two types. Having an agent in a space will let you collect tokens... provided that you're further up on that color's influence track than any opponents also at the location. Ah, but before the agents claim tokens, one racketeer at the location gets to act first, regardless of influence, claiming one token of its owner's choice. So the game sees a lot of churn in players replacing each other's racketeers, climbing on one influence track or another, and keeping close watch on which opponent is in the lead.
Deck building is the mechanism used to go up in influence and to place workers... but it's deck building with an unconventional costing system. Each card you play gives you the option to take a game action. But most actions are paid for in "favors" you'll have to pay back later. Each favor is a dead card, giving you no action when you shuffle later and re-draw it. But once drawn, you immediately get to "trash" the card and get it back out of your deck. So unlike a typical deck builder, where your deck grows ever bigger and stronger, Plunderbund is about an ebb and flow, choosing which actions are worth diluting your deck for, and knowing when it's gotten thin enough again that you can push a bit harder and temporarily flood it with more favor cards.
As for the actual deck building? You only actually ever add 6 new non-favor cards to your deck over the course of the entire game; at regular intervals, you get a pair of new cards via serpentine draft -- selecting either to lean into your emerging strategy, or to shore up vulnerabilities you've found along the way. Otherwise, it's all about managing "throughput" of as many cards as possible, and keeping tabs on how many favors you have at the moment.
It is different... but it's also pretty easy for one player to run away with it. It's one thing to limit actions in a game and force players to choose what to do. It's another to allow them to do as much as they want, even when that's the wrong thing, challenging them to self-police. Players who let too many favor cards into their deck at the wrong time are going to pay for that bad decision over the course of several subsequent rounds, allowing players who manage more thoughtfully (or who just get lucky) to get a real leg up on the competition. If this happens on, say, two consecutive shuffles of one player's deck, that player is likely going to be effectively out of the competition, perhaps without even knowing it.
The game does obscure scoring to some degree by having it occur only at four regular intervals -- but in the back half of the game, one player's lead can seem insurmountable. No, it's not a bad thing for a strategy game to present new skills for a player to master... a skill such as managing this odd new deck building system. But there's an unfortunate Catch-22 here. If players don't all grasp the nuances at the same time, the end score will not be close. And if the game doesn't seem close, it will be hard to convince anyone to play it again in the hopes of improving at it.
I liked Plunderbund's attempt to do something different, and I'm open to playing it again. But overall, the game didn't seem like a hit in my group, and I'd be surprised to see it return to the table much more. On limited experience, I'd give it perhaps a B-. Serious fans of deck building thirsty for something different might want to give it a look. I doubt it would win over anyone skeptical of the genre.
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