Water’s leaking in! The new ship design update now features an area where the water level is rising. The players can order their crew members to the base of the ship, where they’ll throw water out and actually control the speed at which you’re sinking. It also turns “all in” bids into something risky and a gamble.

The “Attack” and “Defend” zones now have cannons which point in to other player’s positions (Defense was working pretty much as a second attack, no point in confusing players) with slots for the resources and the wheel that explains the rock-paper-scissors fighting logic.

I made a new central board that represents the amount of water that leaked inside each boat. The previous spiral board was meant to represent the player ships actually going down on a whirlwind  (which also made every boat sink 1 square at the end of each turn). This is not intuitive and it’s easily forgotten, and ended up being more of an annoyance than welcome flavor.

Now it’s rectangular-shaped, so it allows the free space in the middle of the sheet to serve as storage space for spare crew members and resources. More than once the spiral made it hard to understand which way was “good” and which one was “bad”, and that’s why this gradient color scheme is there. Plus, it fits the theme and hopefully it will be easier to read.

Dice are most certainly out. I want the game to be played by player’s choices and failures rather than by a random element. Changed the attack effect to allow this, and created a situation where the players may wish to wait to a point where their attacks are more effective.

Now I’ll look at the ships for a couple of bus rides, fix what’s wrong and print in time for the Wednesday playtest session!