[Ben]

I figured I’d make a topic about it here, so that others can weigh in with their opinions on what I should do next.

I would just go through with the contact us option and try to get the old account back.

[Ben]

Ardiendo en Infierno
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: Spanish
Rarity: R
Point Value: 15
Number of Masts: 5
Cargo Space: 3
Base Move: S+L
Cannons: 4L-3S-3S-3S-4L
Ability: Crew Killing. [Once per turn when this ship hits an enemy ship, also eliminate one crew from that ship.]
Link: Sultana Marcón

Flavor text: “Burning in Hell” is an apt description of the Sultana’s former enemies. Her vessel makes up for old cannons with surprising speed. Additional firepower is occasionally provided through her passionate crew complement.

Sultana Marcón
Type: Crew
Faction Affiliation: Spanish
Rarity: U
Point Value: 8
Ability: Captain. Fear. Once per turn you may eliminate one mast from a friendly ship within S of this ship to give this ship +1 to her cannon rolls this turn.
Link: Ardiendo en Infierno

Flavor text: A fierce female commander, “the Sultana” may have African origins. Her ferocious fighting style and aggressiveness have earned respect from friend and foe alike.

Historical Custom of the Day #370

Robert Ross
English
Crew
2 points
Ability: Marine. Each turn, one of this ship’s crew cannot use their abilities. You may make a different choice each turn.
Link: HMS Sirius, Scarborough, HMS Gorgon

I know this is kinda bizarre, but you’ll understand his negative ability if you read up on him. Might be worth 3 since you could just “cancel” your own oarsman/shipwright/etc until you needed them, but I’m very tempted to just start pricing Marine at 4 rather than 5 (Wizkids’ 6 is ridiculous), in which case I think the negative is worth maybe -2. Definitely the type of crew you’d want on a high cargo gunship with crew to spare.  He’d probably just be dumped on an island to avoid the negative, but he would quarrel with people on the way there.  XD

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

[Ben]

Just to show how wildly unpredictable the market for Pirates is.  Been seeing plenty of 3 box lots of DJC (SE boxes) on eBay.  Lows were $5, $5.50, etc.  Same thing just sold for $50.  O_O  So that is a 10-fold increase in price even though prices lately haven’t been as high as they were last year, especially last summer.

With an 18 pack box of DJC going for $76, that set is still on a tear.  Average DJC pack price at auction has risen to $2.92.  Probably doesn’t help that HWG has completely run out of that set.

36 pack box of FN (with tournament pack) went for $167.50.

[Ben]

Then again, at 30 points, the Mercs have some crazy stuff in their ranks, so it could quickly become some kind of dreadnought.

And the Pirates and Cursed make it even crazier.  If not for the “all crew have Ransom” negative ability, I’d put this at 35 points, and possibly more like 40.

Given his last name, is Cartavius related to Jack Hawkins in some way?

… perhaps that’s something that the in-game characters will have to figure out….

I think I’d like to see a version of that ability that is not limited to functioning only on its linked ship.

The Reducer ability?  Vinicio Castillo from RtSS has it with other abilities.  Basically Wizkids priced the ability at 2, it’s really only worth 1, and I’m giving it to Hawkins for free as of now due to his limitation and because keeping his cost low helps to fit even more crew on the ship, tying into the flavor text of both and the Ocean’s Bounty crew ability.

[Ben]

Ocean’s Bounty
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: Mercenary
Rarity: LE
Point Value: 30
Number of Masts: 10
Cargo Space: 5
Base Move: L
Cannons: 3S-3S-4L-4L-4L-3L-3L-4L-4S-4S
Ability: Mercenary. Junk. Reroll. Hidden Gold. All crew on this ship have the Ransom keyword. Pirate and Cursed crew can use their abilities on this ship.
Link: Cartavius Hawking

Reroll: Once per turn, you can reroll any die roll you make for this ship; you must use the second die roll result.
Hidden Gold (by Xerecs): This ship has 2 extra cargo spaces that may only be assigned treasure.

Flavor text: This scourge of the law attracts criminals from around the world. There a price on the head of every single sailor who steps foot on the Ocean’s Bounty. Her captain has been deemed a war criminal by nearly every seafaring nation, but that doesn’t stop disgruntled convicts from signing up to participate in the chaos and revelry.

Cartavius Hawking
Type: Crew
Faction Affiliation: Mercenary
Rarity: LE
Point Value: 5
Ability: Captain. Helmsman. Place this crew face up during setup. Reduce the cost of all other crew placed on this ship by 1. This crew can only use his abilities on his linked ship.
Link: Ocean’s Bounty

Flavor text: After one missed payment, Hawking decided to go rogue. Stealing a massive ship from Hong Kong, he quickly assembled a crew of former mercenaries who felt wronged by the warmongers of Europe. Now he accepts even lesser scum and villainy, which only serves to increase his amusement when they anger his former employers. Despite his “most wanted” status, he has been able to work his way out of difficult situations thus far. With a smirk and a shot to the head, Hawking has no love left for civility or legality.

I know Hawking is underpriced. I think it is justified because he can only serve on his ship, and Reducer is more worth 1 point than 2.

Historical Custom of the Day #369

John Hunter
English
Crew
4 points
Ability: Helmsman. This ship ignores terrain when she is given a move action.
Link: All English Ships, John Jervis

I was going to have him link to the ships he served on because that’s how I like to do it, but it starts to become redundant after 5+. And Hunter got around in his long career – I think there were at least a dozen ships listed that he served on! He is yet another crew that could be a Politician in things like the Caribbean game.

This latest string of English explorers of Australia has opened up a ton of new customs, so the Hcustoms will probably be English for a while. Planning to stick mostly with crew though.

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

[Ben]

Big boxes ending tonight! https://goo.gl/GWXNjX

Plus a 3 pack lot of SM up now.

[Ben]

My brother, dad, and friends we’re really into it, so we would have these massive 6 or so player battles that would take forever if everyone were just given one action per turn.

Are they still into it then? (“we’re”)

One action per turn isn’t how the main rules work – were you only allowing players to have a single ship do something each turn?  You can give all your ships actions on every turn.

Feel free to submit any questions you might have for James Ernest on the podcast.

[Ben]

Some neat things I’ve finally commented on: custom 5 master, customs by cannonfury, French review, another post, another, OmegaTraf on a different forum.  Also found some Pirates videos on youtube from WAY back in the day, like 2006-2009.  🙂

[Ben]

White Cannon
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: French
Rarity: R
Point Value: 6
Number of Masts: 1
Cargo Space: 2
Base Move: S+S
Cannons: 3S
Ability: Galley. Parley.

Flavor text: This ship was built solely to transport the beautiful, valuable, and useless cannon made of marble and ivory. The gun and carriage are so heavy that the ship needs full oar power to move at a reasonable pace. Merely a status symbol for the King of France, opponents usually ignore the small galley when they learn of the cargo she carries. More intrigued opponents are paid off using the King’s stores of gold permanently kept aboard.

Historical Custom of the Day #368

Arthur Phillip
English
Crew
7 points
Ability: Captain. This crew can use his abilities on Portuguese ships. This ship gets +1 to her cannon rolls against Spanish ships. Once per turn, this ship may look at one face-down cargo on any ship. This ship gets +1 to her boarding rolls against sea creatures.
Link: HMS Buckingham, HMS Stirling Castle, HMS Egmont, HMS Europa, HMS Sirius, Atlantic, Bennelong

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

[Ben]

@Jeremiah: Thanks for the great questions!

5. How did they make them?

Are you asking how Wizkids made the product, or how the designers made the game pieces with stats/abilities/etc?

6. Does he recall any sets/plans or potential directions Wizkids had in the works? Like what was the direction they had planned for the game?

I’m not sure when his involvement with Pirates stopped; that answer would partly determine the answer to this.  We definitely have some information, and more may be found in the Thread of Threads or old topics at MT in general.

8. Ask him about his current projects and let him have some time to talk about his career now.

We’ve discussed that a little in our emails – he will definitely talk about Cagway Bay, which he hopes to have an updated ruleset for soon.

I thought of another:

Thoughts on flavor text?  Did you design any of the game’s flavor text?  Any artwork input, or was mostly Sandra Garavito, Ethan Pasternack? (who I also plan to try and reach out to, just focusing on one thing at a time haha)

I’m not sure how long this episode would be, so it may be difficult to get to all questions.  Perhaps a rapid fire in the last 10-15 minutes could be a finale.  Or perhaps he’d be willing to answer some questions after the episode.

[Ben]

Huzzah!  Finally a quick and easy fix!  Looking at this solution, all I had to do to enable pagination of thread topics was to disable the threaded/nested reply feature, which I didn’t really like anyway.  Right now I’ve set things to have up to 100 threads per forum page, with 30 replies per page. (twice MT’s limit of 15; I may increase the latter a bit if nobody complains about slow load times)  Already the Custom Ships thread is loading faster for me.  😀

I’ve been watching lots of Sea of Thieves vids lately. I’m sorely wishing I could play that. Alas, my poor laptop would not be able to support it, and getting a PC that does will be EXPENSIVE.

Yup.  You could use the time you use watching the videos to do something to make money instead.  But then you might not have time to play the game, or you might have better things to do with the money.  🙂

[Ben]

I’ve taken recently to listening to Adrian von Zeigler, I used two of his compositions in the island making video. Other than him I’ve discovered Antti Martikainen.

I knew I remembered that first name from somewhere.  They were two of the composers I/we listened to during CG1.  I’ll have to get them up during THC sometime.

[Ben]

@Ben

Just looked a bit through your customs sheet and discovered your three planned lighthouses. I’m excited to see what ideas you have for them. The Pillar of Eternity is a great addition already. Its ability (I won’t spoil your announcement of it since it has yet to be revealed) fits right into preexisting Pirates abilities so it doesn’t seem so foreign as many of my lighthouses do. Plus love the flavor text!

Thanks!  😀  I haven’t quite completed a full custom lighthouse of my own yet, but between some fantasy ideas and some historical precedents, I couldn’t resist your idea.  🙂  As said elsewhere, the Age of Sail sheet is much messier and random than Epic Seas, because a lot of times I just dump links to stuff I’ll make later so I don’t forget.

Also is there a planned “Published Custom” thread or how would you like us to present all our finalized customs?

I’m a big believer in data storage and backup.  I think each person having a Google Spreadsheet like mine for each set or all of their sets/customs is the way to go for various reasons.  I suppose it’s partly just because I don’t want people to be mad at me if they lose stuff they’ve submitted here (if the hosting company screwed up, or I accidentally “broke” the forum temporarily while editing the site), but I think it’s best for each person to store their customs somewhere other than where they publicly might release them.

As I said a few days ago:

Pros of using a Google Spreadsheet: updated instantly (no need to redo file uploads to BGG/elsewhere when a simple change is made), people can view changes in real time, very easy to share, very searchable/sortable (you can sort columns by mast count, filter out a specific faction, find every instance of an ability very quickly, etc), other people don’t need to download anything, you can download the spreadsheet in various file formats including .xlsx whenever you want. (I download a copy whenever I add 10+ pieces to either of my sets in one session, so even if google drive implodes or becomes unavailable/etc I’ll still have a copy on my computer, then you can also periodically reupload that file to a file storage site for extra backup)

I think a shared online spreadsheet works best for the above reasons.  I’d prefer to not have another Organized Version thread, because even that requires editing and people’s posts become out of date.  In terms of showing which customs in an online spreadsheet are to be used or not, simple things can be implemented.  For example, a “finalized” sheet and an “under construction” sheet in the same document.  Or as I do it, leave a stat blank, and obviously the custom is not to be used.  I prefer to just put a question mark after a point cost or whatever to mark that something isn’t finalized and isn’t ready for playtesting.

I really like that a shared spreadsheet can have changes seen in real time (I just made the Pillar of Eternity for example!) and doesn’t require uploading a new spreadsheet document to the web for every little change (of which there can be many, as seen in the custom review podcast episodes).  It’s also easier to share, since links to the shared sheet can be posted on pretty much any website, but file sharing is less ubiquitous and usually requires the viewer to download a file to their computer (which could already be out of date by the time they download it).  I may try to let users upload files to this site someday, but there are other things to do first….

On a side note, should this forum be broken up into pages? From personal experience it takes forever to slide through all the posts on my phone…. what do you all think?

Yes.  That is something I hope to work on very soon, especially for this thread.  This thread loads a bit slow for me nowadays and I understand that compromises how much people will post.  I’d prefer more than the 15 posts per thread page at MT (since it makes searching with ctrl+f far easier), but this one has ballooned and should be broken up.

I actually have forum pagination enabled, but for some reason it just doesn’t work. (based on my settings, it should already work as you want it to, so I’ll have to figure out why it’s not)

Sam Grunis
Type: Crew
Faction Affiliation: American
Rarity: U
Point Value: 7
Ability: Loyal: America. Captain. Reroll. Place this crew face up during setup. Reduce the cost of all other crew placed on this ship by 1.

Flavor text: Although just 25, Sam Grunis has proved a very capable captain for the U.S. Navy. He has thrived in every situation thus far in his career, and is exceptional at providing care and motivation for every member of his crew.

Historical Custom of the Day #367

HMS Sirius
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: English
Rarity: C
Point Value: 7
Number of Masts: 2
Cargo Space: 4
Base Move: S+S
Cannons: 4S-4L
Ability: This ship gets -1 to her reef rolls.
Link: Thomas Jamison, John Hunter, Arthur Phillip, Robert Ross, Daniel Southwell, Jacob Nagle

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

[Ben]

Has anyone in the Pirating community played a PC game titled East India Company? It’s a decent game in the age of sail.

No, but like the dozens of naval and empire video and board games I’d love to play someday, it looks very cool.  If Pirates ever comes back or categorically can never come back for some reason, I hope to someday in the distant future have time to play some of them. (Naval Action, Age of Empires, 4X games, etc)

[Ben]

So should it return I like the idea of a hybrid system where there is some degree of certainty and better miniature distribution but keep some aspects of the collectible alive.

I agree.  I think a box with 10 ships could have perhaps 8 guaranteed and then 2 random.  I like having a 9/10 odds selection for essential generic crew (captain/helmsman/explorer/oarsman all on one card) but then having a 10% chance of getting the specialist card or a card with shipwright/cannoneer/musketeer/silver explorer on it.  Although even a “best of both worlds” approach wouldn’t please everyone of course.

I think part of the reason I like the idea of it being less collectible is so people can’t say it’s dead all the time.  🙁  Gotten pretty tired of that over the years.  I think part of the problem with restarting it the same as it was last time is the potential for another out of print event.  Between advancing technology, other games (Naval Action, other naval board games, etc), and future recessions, I feel that making the game less centered around collectibility would be better for the game’s longevity.  I’d prefer that over the potential short term profit of selling a lot of random packs for a potentially short period of time. (keeping in mind that at this point, the game has been out of print for about twice as long as it was in print)

[Ben]

More advancements in 3D printing!

[Ben]

Anywho, back to the Keyword. I’m fine with leaving Limit out of it, and go ahead and use it (or any of my other Custom Keywords for that matter) as much or as little as you’d like.

Great, thanks!

Carnage might be OK at 20, just don’t go any lower.  🙂

[Ben]

I think you and GM recommended that it become a written out ability.

I think we probably said that because of the Limit inclusion.  Generally keywords should not be within other keywords.  It’s confusing, easy to forget, and leads to looking up chains of abilities just to see what “one” ability does.

I should have mentioned this when I posted the Tesoro – I am using a custom version of your Hidden Gold ability without the Limit keyword.  I’m sorry if that’s against your intent with the keyword, but I think it remains a fair ability (not super OP even at a relatively low cost of perhaps 3) and becomes both less confusing and easier to use than it is with Limit attached.  Similar to what Woelf has said, I maintain my stance that adding Limit to things is not a good way to reduce their cost or make them less OP.  I really like the keyword so I hope you don’t have a problem with me using a modified version of it.

[Ben]

This would also apply to derelicts and any other situations where a normal ship couldn’t be given a move action for some reason.

I guess I just fundamentally disagree with the ruling.  If a move action cannot be given to the target, then anything that happens as a result of that “move action” cannot occur.  I don’t think it should matter if the opponent wants to give the target a move action – if they can’t, they can’t.  Their will cannot break the rules of the game….

I understand that move actions can be as small as the player wanted, to a fraction of a millimeter just to say they moved.  But if something CAN’T be given a move action, there is no action to give in the first place and thus no following effects can happen that rely on the move action itself.

I feel like interpreting the part that says “the opponent to your right may give this ship a move action” meaning that they can give the ship a “move action” regardless of whether or not they should be able to, supersedes whether or not the target can be given a move action.  In this case, like cancelling the Flotilla keyword and pretending that it has moved on its own somehow.

[Ben]

Clouds of Strelbair
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: Barbary Corsair
Rarity: C
Point Value: 16
Number of Masts: 3
Cargo Space: 4
Base Move: S+L
Cannons: 3S-4L-3L
Ability: Galley. Eternal. Hidden Gold.

Flavor text: A mysterious vessel, it is not usually known whether the Clouds of Strelbair is carrying corsairs, gold, both, or neither. She has fallen out of association with the rest of the Barbary fleet, making her a conundrum to approach.

Historical Custom of the Day #366

Bungaree
English
Crew
4 points
Ability: Explorer. Crew of any nationality may use their abilities on this ship.
Link: Matthew Flinders

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

[Ben]

In a somewhat related topic, I recently watched this neat program on the BBC about the Spanish Armada. I think you might enjoy it!

Awesome, thanks!  I’ll try to watch it sometime.  Speaking of good long youtube videos, the Gibraltar headline reminded me of this documentary on the discovery of a Spanish shipwreck, which led to an incident off Gibraltar I believe.

[Ben]

You can thank @CaptainVendari for that one.  It’s intriguing but as Woelf has said many times, it’s tough to implement a system like that without breaking a lot of the existing rules and abilities.

Are you saying that every ship essentially gets the Captain ability built-in with your rules?

I’m curious though, if more combat is encouraged, how would that make the games take less time?

[Ben]

Captain, EA, and doctor or something along the like. Not crew protection, as that’d be too good, but a third ability could distinguish him somewhat.

Why do you still think Crew Protect is so much better than Doctor?  They accomplish the same thing, and I don’t think there are many loopholes that make Crew Protect better.  Neither protects against capture or removal from the game, and Doctor has the added benefit of being able to use it in the niche situation with the recruiters.

@Ben, So leave him as-is for now then? Or go with Xerecs’s idea about him?

Almost anything is better than Captain + EA and nothing else, simply because it’s pretty much OP by default.  Any faction that gets a crew like that, automatically has their best crew or one of their best crew ever in a lot of instances.  Either ability mentioned above would increase the cost to 12, which would deter most usage in small games and make him somewhat prohibitively expensive/impractical in some large gunship setups.  The “choose which mast” would increase it to 10.  If you want to take the flavor text to another level, make the EA contingent on having his sister aboard the same ship.

Another reason that he feels unnecessary is because he’s a direct clone of de Alva from F&S.  With the amount of custom abilities and existing ability combos out there (Captain + AA for example) that Wizkids didn’t make, having a clone just feels kinda boring. (I’m sure I have some too, but I just think it’s best to limit making things that Wizkids already did, especially in the case of OP stuff)

@JW: Sorry if this was cleared up anywhere else, but with Repeating Guns, do you HAVE to shoot each cannon again?  I still think the drawback outweighs the effectiveness and I’d be inclined to hedge my bets with that ability, perhaps only shooting with a ship’s very accurate cannons on the second go-round even if I had plenty still in range.

I think Vega would be fine at 5.  Reverse Captain is worse than Captain and really only worth 2 points.

Grand Diamond
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: Jade Rebellion
Rarity: R
Point Value: 24
Number of Masts: 6
Cargo Space: 5
Base Move: L
Cannons: 4S-4S-3S-3S-4S-4S
Ability: Junk. Secret Hold. Two hits from the same shoot action are required to eliminate one of this ship’s masts.
Link: Hainesh Deng

Flavor text: Diamonds are embedded at the base of this ship’s masts, and new diamonds are used to decorate the ornate stern as they become available through funds from the ship’s trading voyages.

Hainesh Deng
Type: Crew
Faction Affiliation: Jade Rebellion
Rarity: U
Point Value: 5
Ability: Captain. UT Hoard. [Once per turn, if this ship is touching another ship, reveal all face-down treasure aboard the other ship. This ship can take as much unique treasure from the other ship as she can carry.]
Link: Grand Diamond

Flavor text: Deng is a brutal commander whose vile habits have been kept in check by his superiors. Time will tell if his evil habits ever lead to a “crime of passion”.

Huzzah! I have reached HCustom #365, which means this is the one year anniversary of me posting a historical custom every single day!! 😀

Historical Custom of the Day #365

HMS Reliance
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: English
Rarity: C
Point Value: 8
Number of Masts: 2
Cargo Space: 4
Base Move: S+S
Cannons: 5S-5S
Ability: This ship’s combined cost of crew may exceed this ship’s point limit.
Link: Henry Waterhouse, Matthew Flinders, George Bass, John Hunter, Bennelong

Not sure if all of those crew will be made in time….

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

[Ben]

I have been considering swapping Ándres Santana’s EA with SAT(Once per turn, before you give this ship an action, roll a d6. On a 5-6, this ship may be given the Same Action Twice). On this I ask your opinions.

Definitely don’t; SAT is generally better than EA simply because it’s cheaper but achieves nearly the same effect. (and he would mostly be used on gunships)  In general combining Captain with EA or SAT and nothing else should be avoided because it just further increases the number of extremely powerful crew in the game.

Fecal Explosion
Type: Flotilla
Faction Affiliation: Cursed
Rarity: R
Point Value: 6
Number of Masts: 1
Cargo Space: 0
Base Move: T
Cannons: 4S-4S-4S-4S
Ability: Flotilla. This ship only shoots stinkpots and cannot shoot regular shots.

Flavor text: The “toilet at sea” is a tool the Cursed use to clear areas of civilians. When the feces start flying, sailors start splitting.

Historical Custom of the Day #364

Edward Jordan
Pirate
Crew
5 points
Ability: Massacre. [If this ship succeeds at a boarding party, she can eliminate all of the other ship’s crew.]

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

[Ben]

@J.: Welcome!

I stopped playing after the sea monsters were released because finding players to play was becoming increasingly difficult.

In your area, do you think that was because of the sea monsters, or just declining popularity of the game in general?

No gameboard is needed and I like how miniatures give me a sense of being high in the sky.

I enjoy that too – the scale of the game is great for naval scenarios and fleet actions.

I Googled info on POTSM in November or December of 2018, found your site and it’s the only Pirates CSG site that I knew of before reading some of this topic’s 2nd and 3rd entries today.

Great to know, thanks.  I’m happy to have gotten rankings in Google.

@Ve1m: Great to see you back on board!  🙂

I also do some miniature painting and terrain making and want to full-fill my 14 year dream of making an epic custom game board for pirates in 2019.

Nice!  That can be very fun, and it might inspire you to play, accomplishing two goals at once!  😀

[Ben]

Been greatly enjoying the podcast Ben. I’m super appreciative of your dedication to this game after so many years. I was on miniature trading for a while under the same name, but it’s been years since I’ve been active.

Ahoy there, I remember you don’t worry!  Though I remember it as velm with an L rather than 1.  Thanks, glad you’ve been enjoying the podcast.

I hope all this makes sense (my rules knowledge, while it used to be extensive, is very rusty after years of not playing), but I was hoping you could discuss this on the podcast with a guest, I’d love to hear your guy’s opinions on alternating combat.

It makes sense and is something I’ve thought about.  I have this or something similar printed out, but I haven’t tried it yet.  Good thing to discuss in general, whether it’s just combat or for all actions in a regular game.  Thanks for the suggestion!

[Ben]

@Chris: Listened to the Muse song, not bad.  Reminded me of this song (at least the vocals).  Also a slight bit of Dream Theater vibes, which is good.  The E.S. Posthumus song was nice.

@Rick: Put the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack on my “to listen to” list.  Star Wars music is great.  🙂

[Ben]

You’d still have to roll for the Maps’ effect before the Flotilla could take an action, and even though it technically can’t move, the block on giving it other actions would still apply.

Why?  It says “On a result of 5 or 6, the opponent to your right may give this ship a move action. If he or she does, this ship may not be given another action that turn.”  If the opponent cannot even give the flotilla a move action, then the flotilla can be given an action that turn.

I thought about turning the Fruit into a cannon, but it’s in my Pirate fleet in CG4 so I’d have to get lucky if there’s a custom Pirate crew out there like Carbon Charlie.

[Ben]

there’s really no limit to the potential designs – find a couple pictures or photos of any ship type in history and it could be created.

Great point.  We could have ketches, barques, alternative sail plans, etc.

AR/VR games are neat, but they’ll never completely replace physical games, at least not in our lifetimes, and many people will actively avoid them.

Agreed for the most part, but our lifetimes will hopefully be longer than we were originally expecting… which could mean a lot in a lot of ways.  I think the people actively avoiding some of the best potential VR experiences of the intermediate to long term future could miss out.  Reminds me of a thing I did at Disney World in Florida way back in like 2002 or something – captain a ship and man the cannons.  An immersive Age of Sail experience like Naval Action with the balance, smells, and sights of being on a wooden sailing ship would be incredible.

Letting player groups decide on their own whether to allow customs and which particular customs is the right way to do it.

Indeed, I see the “anything goes” approach working better than massive oversight by some company and a few employees.  All customs could be legal until proven otherwise (meaning OP stuff would be banned/get a cost increase).

[Ben]

Wreck of the Ancients
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: Cursed
Rarity: LE
Point Value: 24
Number of Masts: 10
Cargo Space: 7
Base Move: S
Cannons: 4S-4S-3S-3S-3S-2S-2S-4S-5S-5S
Ability: Junk. One hit eliminate two masts from this ship. This ship is immune to reef damage.
Link: Dhorkolov Bespis

Flavor text: A treasure ship of Zheng He’s fleet wrecked long ago, this monstrous vessel was raised and “reanimated” by Xenthalos himself. Although slow and run-down, she prowls familiar coral reef areas looking for prey to drive onto the shoals.

Dhorkolov Bespis
Type: Crew
Faction Affiliation: Cursed
Rarity: LE
Point Value: 7
Ability: Captain. Shipwright. If this ship is docked at your home island, she may repair two masts in one repair action. This crew can only use his abilities on his linked ship.
Link: Wreck of the Ancients

Flavor text: Dhorkolov was chosen by the Demon King to helm the ancient shipwreck he now calls home. With a passion for fixing things, he has dramatically improved the ship’s capabilities. Her wood is still rotten and weak, so he’s now working on a solution that will make the ship as strong as the Guichuan.

Historical Custom of the Day #363

HMS Investigator
Type: Ship
Faction Affiliation: English
Rarity: C
Point Value: 11
Number of Masts: 2
Cargo Space: 5
Base Move: S+S
Cannons: 4S-4S
Ability: Eternal. This ship sinks when her last mast is eliminated.
Link: Matthew Flinders

This is a good example of a ship conundrum. Seems that at one point she had 3 masts, but spent more time as a 2 masted brig than as a 3 master. The bizarre combination of abilities is due to her being seemingly fragile, but surviving for nearly 80 years despite people remarking her as unseaworthy multiple times.

You can find my custom sets here: Pirates of the Age of Sail and Pirates of the Epic Seas

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