Thanks for the link, I’ll add it to the Game Ideas page. I’ve seen that document before but never looked at it in detail.
Perhaps you could find a middle ground where the captured ship must sail back to your home island before it can be given anything other than a move action or something like that.
Interesting idea that makes sense, neat!
One boarding roll per turn would mean that you can’t conduct this action all at once. You eliminate one crew/mast a turn. So in the example above it would take the Zephyr four turns to finish the boarding action and capture El Leon. Over the course of those 4 moves, El Leon can’t move or shoot, and Zephyr can’t shoot and can’t move unless it becomes no longer pinned.
Whoa… that changes everything about this, and seems like way too long of a battle (relative to this game) considering all that can happen in those turns. That makes boarding too big of an event in my opinion, and it shouldn’t really be a separate action.
One thing is for sure – you should NOT be able to immobilize an enemy ship just by ramming them. There’s a reason “reverse pinning” was banned once the old Bonaparte strategy got popular. Also, stopping the rammed ship from shooting is hard to imagine as well. You could ram a fully loaded 10 master with a 1 master and keep it from moving AND shooting until the boarding stuff ended….