![]() Of course, placing new tiles means that the board grows, and in my second or third playtest of Untitled Pirate Game, that became a problem. But it doesn’t really matter-just like in Betrayal, the simple act of moving a piece to the edge and then placing a new tile drives this game on a visceral level. I like to handwave the narrative by saying that of course the seas have always existed in the configuration represented by the tiles, and the players are new recruits / smugglers, mapping the region for themselves for the first time. So, while it doesn’t make a ton of thematic sense that the factions in Ahoy are “exploring the seas” (wouldn’t the Bluefin Squadron already know where the islands are?) it taps into a gameplay element that was really important to me when I was designing. Board games, for me, are largely about a sense of exploring space, and while I appreciate economic, euro-type games where the players explore a system, an abstracted “decision space,” games that I really vibe with are games where that exploration maps itself directly onto the table space. This leaves a tangible record of the game for you to enjoy between turns, and once the game ends. It was (and still is!) one of my favorite games to play, in large part because of the central action of the game: Move your piece off the edge and add a tile. I was really inspired by Betrayal at House on the Hill in this. ![]() ![]() That central action mechanic survived until the game’s Kickstarter attempt, and it provided the architecture that underlies Ahoy’s dice-placement actions.īut the other key design principle is what really survives into the design: building the map as you go by laying tiles. But I wanted to get right to prototyping, and I knew I had a couple decks of cards. I started with a standard 52-card deck, and assigned suits: Clubs for cannons, Spades for movement, Hearts for crew, and Diamonds for… something else? I don’t even remember what “crew” did. First, I had the idea to use cards for actions. I remember two important design aspects of the first version of Untitled Pirate Game, one of which survived into Ahoy. I still have about 250 of them in my attic. I planned to make 3 kits for playtesting, so I ordered and spray-painted 300 tiles. I knew 1) that I wanted to make a pirate game, 2) that I wanted it to feature LOTS exploration, and 3) that, based on no information whatsoever, I would use 100 tiles per game kit. I ordered square blank tiles from The Game Crafter, spray-painted them blue in my apartment building’s laundry room, and put stickers on them to represent the “terrain” types. In 2015, I started making the game that became Ahoy. But my usual gaming groups were not down for something as long or component-heavy as Merchants & Marauders, so my self-imposed design brief when I started working on this game in 2015 was “Merchants & Marauders, but shorter and lighter.” The game’s open possibility space, the sense of exploration and wonder, the ecological interactions of the players and the non-player governments just set my brain on fire. In 2013, I played Christian Marcussen and Kasper Aagaard’s Merchants & Marauders exactly one time. In the second part, I’ll share a bit about my own life and how it impacted the game’s journey. I’m so excited to get to reflect on the history of Ahoy this week! In the first part of this piece, I’ll go a bit more into the nitty-gritty of how the game developed between the time I first started conceptualizing and when I turned the prototype over to Nick for development.
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