I still remember playing Port Royale on my old computer (40 GB hard drive!!!!) and enjoying some trading, pirating and the occasional gambling in the game.
While working on something else I had the idea of having something similar in board game form.
I started tinkering around a little and quite quickly had a very nice looking prototype.
A complete map out of all available tiles
The premise of the game is quite simple. You start out with 1 ship and try to have the most gold at the end of the game.
At the beginning of the game a starter map is created by all players and over time it gets expanded with the use of additional tiles. Some tiles are marked to have cities (they aren’t show on the picture above) and for each of those cities you have a sheet showing you what goods and services they offer.
City card
Players places markers for each resource at specific locations and depending on the abundance (marked by the thick lines after the first and third column) of each resource the prices go up or down. Each port offers 3 out of the 5 available resources (wood, corn, cotton, brick, and metal) as well as services (increasing a ship’s capacity, speed, strength or adding cannons). Also, each city has some properties (number of ships that can dock at the same time, resource capacity, and speed of production). All properties and services can be upgraded or added respectively for which the players can become city mayors and earn discounts.
You go from port A to port B (or any other of the 10 total cities). Buy and sell goods, upgrade your fleet and hope that after the very last round of play you have the most gold.
If you like a little more action, then this next part is for you.
Some cities offer the service of installing cannons on your ships. This lets you attack and loot other player’s ships. That way you can gain resources quicker and sell them for more gold in the end. But keep in mind that once you attack a ship and become a pirate only certain cities (marked with a skull) will accept you in their ports and do business with you.
Ship card
This game has all components printed, cut and prepared that the only thing left is playtesting and tweaking the rules.
I’ll dive into the rules in the next update.
Until then,
Keep playing games