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Thank you to those who recently took the Rules Survey! It feels good to get back into this thread idea.
Are there any changes you would recommend in regards to explore actions?
Only friendly ships, and derelicts should allow an automatic exploration
I find this quite intriguing. It is a bit strange thematically that exploring a friendly ship (that presumably has sailors on it) takes longer than a ship in question exploring an entire island she may not have ever been to. It would probably make explorers more useful throughout a game, rather than mostly being useful in the first half of games. It would be nice to strike a balance where specific ships that have explored islands can explore those same islands as a free action later in the game, but it would require too much tracking effort to be worth it.
Are there any changes you would recommend in regards to repair actions?
A shipwright should be able to put out fires as a repair action
Agreed.
Any other endgame conditions you use regularly?
To specify about gold in forts counting towards victory, I think it should only count when no other action can be made. It shouldn’t count if there is an opportunity to battle over the fort.
I’m not sure I like this. Essentially, forts would extend the game even more than they already do, as having one in play would make the “more than half” endgame trigger irrelevant on its own. Might need to ponder it more though.
If you have used house rules, which ones are your favorites?
I even made my own terrain, Pack Ice, it’s essentially a Sargasso Sea, but it moves like rolling fog, and any ship caught in it drifts with it. It also allows you to explore/unload cargo and crew to any island the ice touches. If the ice touches an iceberg, it affects the ship the same way as if the iceberg hit the ship directly.
Love this idea and might try it this year!
What other house rules would you suggest?
Make musketeers rare crew, and they can target other crew instead of masts.
A crew based way to capture a ship without destroying it? I’m not sure how, I just don’t like the capture rules as they are.
Allow your own crew to use their abilities on captured ships regardless of nationality.
These definitely sound worth trying out to me.
Feel free to leave your thoughts on these rules topics and ideas!
I find this quite intriguing. It is a bit strange thematically that exploring a friendly ship (that presumably has sailors on it) takes longer than a ship in question exploring an entire island she may not have ever been to. It would probably make explorers more useful throughout a game, rather than mostly being useful in the first half of games. It would be nice to strike a balance where specific ships that have explored islands can explore those same islands as a free action later in the game, but it would require too much tracking effort to be worth it.
This is an artifact of the weird way the game does (and does not) compress time. If you arrive at an island without an Explorer on board, your ship’s crew are really spending the entire time from when you first dock up through your next turn actually exploring the island. When you get to the actual “explore” action the turn after docking, really all they’re doing is loading up whatever they found and dragged out to the beach, which is more consistent with the time spent transferring stuff directly between ships at sea. Another ship in your fleet going to the same island later can load up more quickly because the stuff left behind is already sitting in a place that’s known and accessible (to your own ships, at least; others would still have to search).
Explorers (and extra actions) throw off the math, and there’s not really a good thematic explanation for either of them unless you assume that each player turn is taking place over several days, so they’re really just adding efficiency. Helmsman are similar in that they don’t increase a ship’s top speed, but they plot a better course so you can cover that much more distance in the same amount of time.
A shipwright should be able to put out fires as a repair action
No objection here. Shipwrights feel like they could be made a lot more useful in general. Spending an entire action to replace a single mast barely feels worth it unless you’ve got a lot of spare time. It would be interesting if repairing at an island (one mast at a time) was always an option, but a shipwright would make the action better by letting you replace multiples at once.
To specify about gold in forts counting towards victory, I think it should only count when no other action can be made. It shouldn’t count if there is an opportunity to battle over the fort.
I’m not sure I like this. Essentially, forts would extend the game even more than they already do, as having one in play would make the “more than half” endgame trigger irrelevant on its own. Might need to ponder it more though.
I’ve said (and/or implied) it many times before, and will say it again. The “more than half” endgame trigger is dumb, and should not be used at all.
It’s okay if you’re using the illustrated rules and playing with a single game pack each, but as soon as you move up to a full “standard” game, it quickly loses any purpose for existing.
I even made my own terrain, Pack Ice, it’s essentially a Sargasso Sea, but it moves like rolling fog, and any ship caught in it drifts with it. It also allows you to explore/unload cargo and crew to any island the ice touches. If the ice touches an iceberg, it affects the ship the same way as if the iceberg hit the ship directly.
This does sound really cool, especially the part where you can treat it kinda like an island while your ship is stuck.
Make musketeers rare crew, and they can target other crew instead of masts.
Rarity of items is largely irrelevant to anyone with a decent-sized collection or access to proxies, so that should never be a factor in what an item can do. The way crew are used in the game, being able to target them directly can quickly become overpowered, so I think it’s better that the abilities that do target crew are few and far between, and are either named characters or inherent ship abilities, so you can’t just put one on every single ship.
A crew based way to capture a ship without destroying it? I’m not sure how, I just don’t like the capture rules as they are.
Not a bad idea, but the boarding and capture rules would need a complete overhaul to make something like that work. Making it possible to grab an opposing ship that’s largely intact would make the first-to-strike advantage even greater than it already is.
Allow your own crew to use their abilities on captured ships regardless of nationality.
Easy solution for that is push the single-nationality rule harder, and then when you capture a ship you remove and replace the flag on the back with one of your own. It has always felt weird thematically to be able to capture an enemy ship and then use it while still flying the enemy’s colors. That might be part of the idea they were going for with the pennants included in the older ship models, but they should have included an extra flag or two as well (or instead). Making all of the flags the same smallish size would have been better too, so they’d be much easier to interchange without having to swipe one from another ship of the same specific size.
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