⚓ privateer

readme

A card-based privateering roguelike, round the world in 16XX. It's an alpha: play it at bobbymeyer.com/privateer.

Underneath it is a rules module that knows nothing about drawing, a browser front end in Svelte, a terminal harness, and simulators that play whole runs to tune the numbers. Every push to main is tested and published to GitHub Pages, and the site serves it from there.

playing

Play it on the site, or npm run dev and open the page. You're a privateer out of Plymouth in a pinnace with 20 gold. Bring 150 home to London and the run is won. Sink, and it's over.

• Sail by clicking the sea to set a course, then set sail. The ship goes a day at a time and stops when it arrives, when a ship comes alongside, when you sight uncharted land, or for news worth heaving to for: a storm, a mutiny, a war declared, the crew close to mutiny (a log line with stop set; see sailToward). Drag to pan, wheel or the buttons to zoom.
• In port, the bar sells rounds (rumors) and hires crew; the yard mends the hull (1 gold a point), fits upgrades and sells bigger ships. A port of a nation that wants you won't deal with you until you bribe its officials.
• Rumors show as red rings that fade. Pick one in the list to see the cloud of where its ship could be by now. The cloud is tighter where you've seen the current and wind (blue and dashed grey arrows a step out).
• Meeting a ship at sea: a guard ship or armada of a nation that wants you, or that's at war with England, attacks on sight. Anyone else comes alongside and you choose: attack, or let her pass. Spain and the Barbary corsairs are fair game; anyone else's ships, the Crown hears of; an English ship makes you a pirate.
• Raiding a port: in port, you can raid it instead of trading.
• Build the deck. Take a ship and her stores are offered: three cards off her, keep one or none. A yard will strike a card out for 6, down to 10. Your deck is listed under your ship. Hands of note draw wages.
• Under the chart, three tabs. Location is whatever is where you are: a port's bar, yard, ships for sale and raid, or at sea the water you're in — whose waters, a strait, a bank, a river mouth, a fort's guns, an island anchorage. Arriving in a port turns to it. Politics is who's at war, the strain on a peace, your standing with each nation, your name, and the flags. Ship & crew is the ship sheet. The sidebar keeps what you glance at while sailing: the ship's gauges, the course, your letter, what's in sight, rumors and news.

Ship and crew have a sheet of their own (src/ui/ShipSheet.svelte), in its tab under the chart: the ship drawn to her size, her hull and morale, each hand of note with what they bring and what they cost, the refits, and the deck laid out as cards, grouped by where each came from — the ship, each refit, each hand, the prizes — with struck cards shown struck, and a strike button on each in a port with a yard. In port, every hire, refit and ship for sale says what it would add before you buy it. The sidebar's sections fold.

• Read a ship before you engage. The lookout sees ships two days past the water you can read, and a hostile sail coming into view stops you. Alongside, or in the in sight list, you see her hull against yours and how she fights: heavily gunned, fast, hard to shake off, a rich hold.
• Your name gets about. The more your prizes pay, the farther the hunters and privateers come for you, and the better found. Make the score and word gets out: every enemy privateer puts to sea to stop you getting it home.
• Barbary corsairs raid the open towns of their enemies for captives. Take one laden and the captives go free.
• Keep the crew in heart. Morale runs out of ten. A long stretch with no prize sours them, and at nothing it's mutiny. A prize, a round in the bar, fresh water at an island and a good omen all put it up.
• Some events ask you. A storm, the crew wanting their shares, a man on the beach of new land: each stops the ship and offers a choice, with what each choice stakes told plainly.
• Islanders in Guam, Hawaii, Tahiti, Tonga, the Marquesas and Rapa Nui trade water, fruit and timber, not drink or ships. Sometimes they put out war canoes instead.

Each run has a seed in the URL; ?seed=42 plays the same world again.

The run saves as you go (src/save.ts), to the browser's storage, after every day and every card. A reload picks it up where it was, mid-fight included, unless the address asks for a different seed. A finished run is forgotten. A save carries a version: when the shape of the state changes, SAVE_VERSION goes up and older saves are dropped rather than loaded half-understood.

How to play opens on a first visit and from the header after. In a fight, hovering a card explains its words, and what the cards say under the hand lists them all (GLOSSARY in src/describe.ts).

Every nation has its colours, a field and a border, like a flag at a distance (src/world/colors.ts). England is white edged red, the Dutch orange edged blue, France blue edged gold, Spain yellow edged red, Portugal green edged red, the Danes red edged gold, Japan red edged white, independent harbours black. They mark ports (squares fortified, circles open), ships in sight (triangles, warships larger), rumor rings, each nation's protected waters (a faint wash), the standing list and the fight sheet, with a key under the chart.

The chart is a woodcut (src/ui/woodcut.ts, src/ui/SeaChart.svelte), sepia on parchment, after the engraved charts of the century, and all of it drawn in code:

• Water-lining: every coast drawn again and again out to sea.
• Hatching across the land, the same density at any zoom.
• Wave marks scattered on the open sea.
• Rhumb lines fanning from a rose in each ocean.
• The seas lettered as the charts of the time named them: Mar del Nort, Mar del Sur, Oceanus Indicus, Mare Germanicum.
• Ports as woodcuts, a tower for a fortified port and two houses for an open town, and ships as hull and sails in their flag's colours.
• A wind rose and a graduated border, fixed to the frame.

The coast is drawn nine times over for the water lines, so it's drawn only where it can be seen and only as fine as a pixel. Each nation's protected waters are built once, as one path. A pan costs the same as it did before the engraving.

the loop

1. Your ship's cards and the target's cards are shuffled into one deck.
2. Three are dealt. Keep two, in the order they should resolve; then they're spent, into the discard. The third goes to the bottom of the deck. A spent card comes back only when a card says so: recall brings back that side's most recently spent cards, under the deck, never damage. The boatswain's all hands recalls one of yours; a fortress mending its walls recalls one of its guns.
3. It ends when either side flees, when either hull reaches 0, or when the deck can't deal a full hand and the ships part.

Every action and decision in combat is a card. There is no stop button.

• shot — hit and hurt strike the hull at once; brace soaks yours.

• wounds — some shot also leaves a wound that outlasts it, a card on top of the deck against the side it struck:

  • a leak below costs 2 hull when it's kept;
  • fire aboard costs 3;
  • sails shot away cost nothing, but while they're in a side's deck or hand, its flee cards don't work.

  Keeping a wound deals with it, pumping or fighting the fire or repairing aloft, at its cost, and it's spent. Sending it to the bottom only puts it off. Two in a hand, and one gets through. Your broadside leaves a leak, your chain shot their sails. A galleon's great guns, an escort's or an armada's broadside leave leaks. A fort fires heated shot. A guard ship fires chain and bar at your rigging, to stop you running.

• way — a side gets away by making way: three of it and she's away. A flee card makes 2, so it takes two, unless the other side takes way back in between. Anyone may run at any time, you included, with plunder in the hold; shot-away sails stop it.

• chase and hold take way off the other side: give chase, crowd on sail, grapnels, boarders, marksmen in the tops, a fleet cutting off your retreat, an armada with the weather gauge. Whoever hunts carries them.

Threat is checked when the card resolves, so order matters. If you play a merchant's flee card before you hurt it, it does nothing. Play it after your broadside and the merchant gets away.

the world

The year is 16XX: the seventeenth century as a setting, never a stated year. Ports, flags and fleets are drawn from across the century, so nothing pins the calendar.

The ultimate win is re-enacting Drake's raid round the world, so the sea is the whole world.

Coastline first, because the coast is where the action is. src/world/data/world.json is built by npm run world from Natural Earth's 1:10m land (public domain):

1. Every coast and island gets a node offshore every 60 nautical miles, about a day's coasting.
2. The open ocean is filled in, sparser the farther it is from land, up to 300 miles apart mid-ocean.
3. Everything is triangulated on the sphere. Any edge that crosses more than a spit of land, or runs far longer than its neighbours, is dropped.
4. Water cut off from the ocean (the Caspian, the Great Lakes) is dropped, and so is the ice beyond 62°S and 72°N.

That gives 6,954 nodes (3,213 on the coast).

Straits narrower than the coastal spacing would be missed, since coastal nodes sit offshore. Ten are traced by hand in src/world/passages.ts and threaded through as chains: Magellan above all, plus Gibraltar, Dover, the Øresund, the Dardanelles and Bosporus, Messina, Bab-el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca and Sunda.

A turn is a day. Every leg longer than a day's sail is split into days (src/world/map.ts), so one step is one turn everywhere. A coastal leg is a day; a 300-mile ocean leg is five, and a ship on it is somewhere along it. Ocean crossings take as long as they did, and most turns are spent near land. That makes 24,331 steps in all.

111 ports (src/world/ports.ts), from across the century and twenty flags: Spain and Portugal's empires, the English, French, Dutch, Danes and Swedes, the Hanse, Venice and Malta, the Ottomans and the Barbary states, Oman, Persia, the Mughals, China, Japan, and independent harbours like Aceh, Bantam and Calicut. Forts put the water a step out under their guns.

The grain of the sea (src/world/ocean.ts):

• Currents are streams with a course, a strength and a width: the Atlantic and Pacific gyres, the Gulf Stream, Kuroshio and Agulhas, the Humboldt, the equatorial currents and countercurrent, the West Wind Drift round the south.
• Wind is a model of the global circulation. The trades blow toward the west and the equator, hardest about 14°, slack in the doldrums. The westerlies blow toward the east and the pole, hardest about 48°, and 40% harder in the south (the Roaring Forties). The belts follow the sun four degrees north and south through the year. The monsoon overrides them over the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea: south-west in summer, north-east in winter.
• Rivers push water out to sea: the Amazon, Congo, Ganges, Yangtze and others.
• Banks keep deep keels off: the Bahamas, Campeche, the Grand Banks, the Dogger, the Great Barrier Reef.
• Seasons are 91 days.

Ships sail a step a turn and favour running with the sea:

Square-riggers let the sea pick their heading: they go round rather than beat. Hunters are weatherly and can work to windward.

Rumors are bought by the round (src/world/bar.ts). In port, stand the house a drink (2 gold) and somebody may tell you about a ship: where it was when they saw it, a few days back.

• What's talked about: ships whose wake came within 30 days of the port. Treasure fleets are talked about five times as much as a merchant, and nearer ships more than farther.
• How stale: a sighting is up to twelve days old, mostly recent; about five on average.
• How true: news from far off is garbled, and each round finds the room drunker. The first round of the night hears something nearly nine times in ten, at about 0.75 reliable; the fifth, under four in ten, at about 0.5. The room turns over overnight.

A rumor says a ship was at a node, on a turn, with some reliability. It is exactly right with that probability; otherwise it is off by up to one step (good sources), two or three (bad ones). Prisoners talk too (interrogate, on boarding party and strike colours, lost if you sink).

Flags, standing and protected waters. Every ship flies its home port's flag; a route ship flies its first port's. Every nation keeps a standing with you. Attack one of its ships and the standing falls: one for landing damage or taking plunder, two for a sinking. Below zero, its guard ships hunt you. Until then they keep station.

Countries protect their waters. The sea within 4 days of a nation's forts is its protected water; where two overlap, the nearer fort decides. A guard ship never enters another nation's waters, so a chase breaks off at the edge and a friendly fort is a refuge. Any foreign guard ship found inside is driven off by that nation's navy (Spanish ships off Plymouth bring out the Royal Navy) and laid up at home; it goes in the world's log. That's why the guard stations are out in the colonies: Europe's home waters are its navies' business. The armadas are exempt, keeping their patrols round their own empire's ports.

What you sail with is what you fight with (src/outfit.ts). Your deck is never stored. It's worked out from your ship, its upgrades and your crew:

• Crew, hired in the bar, one of each, as many as you have berths: a master gunner (double-shotted guns), marksmen (hit and hold), a quartermaster (a prize crew that plunders and questions), a boatswain (all hands: brace 3), a surgeon, a pilot (another bear away), a navigator (a step more sight).
• Upgrades, at the yard, belong to the ship: more guns, a sheathed hull (+2), boarding nets, chase guns. A new ship starts bare.

A bigger ship is sturdier but less nimble. More cards in the deck means the flee cards come round more slowly: from an armada, a pinnace gets away 82% of the time, a brigantine 58%. Hire a pilot.

Grudges fade and can be bought off. Standing drifts a point back toward zero every 60 days. In any port of a nation that wants you, its officials can be bribed a point at a time: 10 gold, times how far below zero you are.

Uncharted islands. Every run hides eight out in open ocean, in nobody's waters, far from ports and from each other. Sight one and the Crown pays 15 for charting it. After that it's an anchorage: no ship troubles you there, and the hull mends a point a day.

Setting a course (src/world/course.ts): each day's step is the one that brings you nearest, and where steps tie, the one that runs best with the current and wind you've charted.

Who's at war with whom (src/world/wars.ts) is part of the world, and it moves:

• How a run opens: England is at war with the Barbary corsairs and Morocco, and with one of Spain, France or the Dutch Republic, chosen by the run. The other powers' wars open as the century had them: Spain against the Dutch and the French, the Dutch against Portugal, the Ottomans against Venice and Malta, the corsairs against nearly everyone.
• It drifts. Every season each pair of powers may make peace (12%) or fall out (3%). The corsairs make peace hard and break it easily. The news reports it.
• You can start a war. Attacking a nation at peace with England puts a strain on the peace: 1 for firing on a ship, 1 more for taking her, 3 for a raid, 2 more for a sack. At 6, England and that nation are at war. The strain fades as grudges do.

For you, sailing for England, it decides what's fair game:

A raid costs three times a ship: −3 to the town's nation when you go in, −2 more if you sack it.

Meeting a ship (src/world/meet.ts), when you share a node with one outside a port. The world waits until you've dealt with it. If several are there, one that means you harm comes first, then the one that matters most by the bar's notability.

• She attacks you if she's hostile: a guard ship, an armada or a privateer of a nation that wants you, or of one at war with England. The fight is on. Guard ships only go out of their way to hunt you once their nation wants you.
• Enemy privateers fit out of Dunkirk, Saint-Malo, Tortuga, Amsterdam, Willemstad, Salé, Algiers, Havana and Cartagena. Whenever their nation is at war with England they come for you, within 20 days of home. Unlike guard ships they go where they like, other nations' waters included: raiding foreign coasts is the trade.
• Anyone else comes alongside, and attacking is your choice. Let her pass and she goes her way, and won't come alongside again for 5 days. Fire on her and her nation remembers it, a point off your standing, however the fight goes, since you fired first; sinking her costs a point more.

Events at sea (src/world/events.ts), once a day while nobody is fighting:

• Morale starts at 7 of 10. From 30 days after the last prize, the crew lose a point every 10 days. At nothing it's mutiny: a hand of note is hanged as a ringleader or deserts at the next landfall, taking his cards out of your deck with him. With nobody of note aboard, the strongroom is broken open and 30% of the gold goes. Afterwards morale is 4 and the clock starts again.
• What puts it up: a prize with a payout, +3 (+4 for a sacked town); the first round bought in a port, +1; trading with islanders, +3; each day at anchor off a charted island, +1; a good omen, +2.
• Good omens, about one day in 45 at sea: birds over the bow, a spring on an island, Saint Elmo's fire, porpoises under the bow.
• Storms, about one day in 120 at sea. Three times as often in the Antilles in autumn and in the Indian seas in the summer monsoon, and twice as often past forty degrees. How to meet it is your choice (see Events that ask you something, below). (At first a storm simply took 1 to 3 hull or some of the gold, it was one day in 80 and up to two fifths of the purse, and the captain bot's wins fell from 43% to 27%; as now, 33% over 30 runs, about 5 storms and 10 omens a run, and no mutinies: the bot takes a prize often enough to keep its crew.)
• Islanders: Umatac on Guam (Spanish, the galleon's watering stop on the way to Manila), and native harbours at Kealakekua, Matavai, Nuku'alofa, Nuku Hiva and Rapa Nui. Native ports have no bar, yard or hands to hire, but trade provisions, 3 gold for +3 morale and +2 hull, once a day. Coming in, 30% of the time the canoes come out to fight instead (70% if you've raided them). Beating them off costs you no standing; raiding their town does.
• Sea monsters: one in each named sea on the chart. A monster drifts where the current takes it, turns for home once it's more than 12 days out, and attacks whoever it meets. It's nobody's, so fighting it costs no standing, and its bounty pays (ambergris, and a story for the bar).

Letters of marque: a run in three acts (src/world/letters.ts). Work in progress on this branch. A run is three letters, each a nation, a region (dashed on the chart), a task, a deadline and a reward: two prizes near home (the Narrow Seas, the Barbary coast), then a town to sack farther out (the Spanish Main, Brazil, the Indies), then a named Spanish plate ship. A letter makes its nation fair game while it lasts. Finishing one pays it and brings the next, with the Admiralty's word of where to look; the plate ship gets fresh word every 30 days. A missed deadline gets more time once, at −2 with England; a second, and the letter is revoked and you're a pirate (a pardon brings a new one). All three and home to London wins; gold is the score. Runs from before letters win the old way.

The Admiralty's latest word of the plate ship stays on the chart till fresher word replaces it, so her cloud is there all act long, widening as the word ages.

Where it stands: the captain bot, which now intercepts (it heads for where she's likeliest to be in k days that it can reach in k days), wins 2 of 30 runs, on day 368 on average; 12 of 30 reach the third letter. It is sunk in 19 of 30: the letters take a small ship into enemy waters.

Events that ask you something (src/world/dilemmas.ts). A storm used to take its toll and log it; the crew soured in silence. Now the events that matter stop the world and ask, and every choice says what it stakes before you pick it:

A choice that can't be made — nothing aboard to lighten, no berth, not enough to pay — is shown barred, with why. The bot rides out a storm on a sound hull, pays shares it can spare, and takes any castaway; with that it wins 27% over 30 runs, against 20% when storms rolled their own cost.

Building the deck (src/outfit.ts, src/world/port.ts). The deck was all bought: a bigger ship, a gunner, and every run converged on the same cards. Now most of it is chosen.

• Prize cards. Take a ship, sack a town, or kill a monster, and three cards from that kind's pool in PRIZE_CARDS are offered: keep one, for good, or leave them. The world waits on the choice. They run along three ways to fight — the guns (hit and wounds: her long guns, a Spanish great gun), the boarders (plunder and hold: her grapnels, boarding pikes), the runner (flee and chase: her pilot, galley sweeps) — and the strong ones cost you: the great gun recoils, the pikes cost blood. Prize cards come with you to a new ship.
• Striking cards. A yard that deals with you strikes a copy of any card for 6, down to a deck of 10. The deck is listed under your ship, with the strike buttons when you're in such a port.
• Wages. Every 60 days each hand of note is paid, 1 or 2 gold, from the purse, which is also your score. Short of it, morale falls 2, and the ship stops to tell you.

Seeing her first (src/world/scout.ts).

• A longer lookout. Ships are seen two steps past the water you can read, and a hostile sail newly in sight stops the ship, with how far off she is and whether she's bearing down — time to run, or turn.
• A read of her, off her deck: her hull with any renown bonus, against yours; how heavily she's gunned (her hurt, and what her wounds would cost, per card); whether she'll run, is hard to shake off, mends quickly, or has help coming; and how rich her hold is, laden corsairs included. It shows on the sheet when she comes alongside, and for every ship in the in sight list.
• What the bot makes of it: 20% won over 30 runs, against 23% before. It takes the first card offered, and it dies later than it did (on day 214 on average, against 74). Letting it sheer off at the longer lookout made it worse (13%): it turned away from too much, and ran out of time.

The late game (src/world/world.ts, src/world/meet.ts):

• Renown, from everything your prizes have paid. At 60, 120 and 200 it goes up a step, and each step hunters and privateers come a quarter farther for you (reach in Pursuit), and a hostile warship comes with 2 more hull. Passing a step is news, and stops the ship.
• The home stretch. With the score in hand and no noose waiting, word gets out, and every privateer of a nation at war with England comes for you, whatever the range. The Channel ports — Dunkirk, Saint-Malo, Amsterdam — are between you and London.
• Barbary corsairs, one each out of Algiers, Salé, Tunis and Tripoli. Each picks an open town of an enemy of its nation within 45 days of home, the nearer the likelier: Baltimore is in reach, and Reykjavík when the Danes are at war with them. It strips the town for 60 days, logs it (and stops your ship if the town was English), and sails home with the captives, where it lies 20 days before going out again. A corsair is hostile to you while its nation is at war with England. Take one laden and it carries 12 more in its hold, and the captives go free: a point with their nation, and one with the Crown.
• What it does to a run: over 30 runs the captain bot wins 23%, down from 33%. Corsairs sank it twice; the bot has no notion of the home stretch and sails into it blind.
• Saves migrate. Each change to the save's shape adds a step to MIGRATIONS in src/save.ts, so a run in progress survives an update.

The fight moves a little, so a round can be read without reading it. A new hand deals in from the deck, a card at a time; a wound card drops onto it from above. Hull, morale and way are rows of pips: a pip lost drains, a pip gained fills, and the difference floats up off the count. The round's lines come in one by one. None of it plays when the reader has asked for reduced motion.

Raiding a port. In port, raid it instead of trading. The fight is the same game against the town's defences, from src/setup.ts:

• A town can't run: no flee cards. Its people carry valuables inland while you fight, so the longer the raid, the less there is to take.

• An open town has a battery, musketry, barricades. A fortified port has great guns and walls to mend, and is too much for a pinnace.

• If the raid goes on, help comes: from the seventh round, the garrison is reinforced, a card on top of the town's deck every other round, four in all. (At first it came every round without end, which flooded every hand with relief.)

• A raiding party can fall back to the boats: two extra flee cards in your deck for a raid. They work when you're threatened, as always.

• Sacking it takes everything left in its treasury, and the town has nothing for anybody (no trade, no raid) for 120 days.

• The alarm: the town's nation's guard ships hunt twice as far, 50 days out, for the next 30 days.

• A raid turned out leaves the town on its guard. Falling back to the boats with what you'd plundered, and coming straight back to a treasury full as new, was the strongest play in the game. Now a raid that ends short of a sack (you fled, or it petered out) puts the town on its guard for 90 days:

  • for the first 14 the boats would never get ashore: no raid;
  • after that its walls have 4 more hull and its relief comes 2 rounds sooner, for each raid it has turned out while on its guard;
  • its treasury starts from what the last raid left it and fills again 1 a day, up to the usual.

  The port panel says all of this. A sack ends the guard. Over 60 seeds the captain bot, which raids enemy towns, wins 22% with the guard against about 28% without.

npm run sim -- --target town --ship brigantine measures a raid:

The relief was first a card that hurt and mended the walls, which made a town nearly impossible to sack; mending only from the barricades, and relief that only fires, is what gives the table its shape.

You sail for England, and attacking an English ship is piracy.

• England wants you, at least -3, and while you're a pirate that grudge doesn't fade.
• English ports won't deal with you, and no bribe changes that.
• London won't count as a win: they'd hang you.
• A royal pardon (80, in any English port) clears it all and sets England back to 0.
• Port Royal and Bridgetown keep English guard ships, pirate hunters, who come out only for a captain England wants.

Every kind of ship has a deck (src/setup.ts):

A ship is credibly threatened, and its flee cards work, at half hull or less, or outgunned three to one. That's what makes a fleet or an armada survivable: against them your flee cards work from the first hand, unless they hold you. A captain who runs whenever a flee card works gets away from a treasure fleet 77% of the time (often with a straggler's plunder) and from an armada 66%. One who stays sinks. npm run sim -- --target armada.

Afterwards it is settled:

• the payout goes in the purse;
• your hull is kept as it came out (mend it in port at 3 gold a point);
• each prisoner questioned (interrogate) gives a rumor about a ship seen in the last few days;
• a ship destroyed is laid up at home for 60 days;
• a ship parted from leaves you be for 5;
• if you're sunk, the run is over.

You see the next node. The water a step out from you, its current and this season's wind, goes on your chart (WorldState.chart). Currents never change, so a current once seen is charted for good. Winds change with the season, but the seasons come round, so wind seen in summer is charted for every summer. Predictions only use what's on your chart: in water you've never sailed, every leg looks the same. sight is one step for now; the crew will extend it.

Each rumor gives two things:

• a marker, which loses a fifth of its strength each day and is gone below a tenth. A 90% rumor lasts ten days.

• a prediction, a cloud of where the ship could be now. It starts at the report and sails forward the way that kind sails:

  • a merchant is bound for one of the ports it trades with, nobody knows which;
  • a treasure fleet keeps its known course;
  • a hunter is bound for you if you're in its range, else for its station.

  It weighs each leg by what's on your chart. The search area is the fewest nodes holding 70% of the cloud.

npm run rumors measures what a chart is worth, from a blank one to the whole sea known. For a 90% rumor, about a random ship, over 80 rumors:

Knowing the sea still helps: a tighter search, and one you can trust. It helps less than on the Caribbean-only map, though, where an eight-day search shrank from 32 nodes to 18. Most ships are merchants working coasts, where the currents are slack and any of a dozen ports is plausible. The sea earns its keep on the long runs: treasure courses, ocean crossings, monsoon passages.

npm run chart -- out.svg land.geojson draws the world. Add --turns 2000 for where ships actually went, --flow current or --flow wind:2 for the sea's grain, and --box w,s,e,n --scale 30 to zoom. Drake's route is traced through the graph on every chart.

balance

npm run voyage plays whole runs with a captain bot. In port it repairs, buys rounds, hires crew and buys a bigger ship when it can spare the gold. At sea it chases the best rumor, sheers off from armadas and from guard ships that want it, fights by lookahead, runs when outgunned, and goes home with the score. It attacks only enemies (Spanish and Barbary merchants and galleons) on a sound hull, lets the rest pass, and raids enemy towns, and fortified ports only from a brigantine up. Over 100 runs it wins 39%, home around day 525, after about eleven raids a run. Most of the rest sink: 30 raiding towns, 13 to armadas, which attack on sight now that Spain is at war with you.

The economy and the danger are one dial. Cutting a town's treasury from 25 to 20 took wins from 39% to 9%, and more captains sank raiding, not fewer: short of gold, they couldn't buy a sturdier ship, and kept raiding in a pinnace.

Getting there took three changes:

• A bigger starting hull (6 to 10). At 6, a merchant fight sank you a quarter of the time: a fine gamble once, but over the 15–25 fights of a run nobody lived. At 10 it's 6%, and each fight costs hull you pay to mend instead.
• Repairs at 1 gold a point, not 3. At 3, mending a merchant fight's damage cost more than the merchant paid.
• Outgunned at two to one, not three, so a fleet or an armada is still something to run from once your hull is bigger.

running it

Node 22.12+.

npm install
npm run dev                  # the browser version, http://localhost:5173
npm run build                # static build in dist/, relative paths
npm run check                # svelte-check and TypeScript

npm test                     # the rules (no install needed)
npm run play                 # one encounter in the terminal, random seed
npm run play -- --seed 42    # that encounter again
npm run sim                  # card bots × 2000 fights (--target armada, --hull 14)
npm run voyage               # whole runs with a captain bot (--runs 40 --days 730)
npm run rumors               # how good a rumor is, by age and knowledge
npm run world -- ne.geojson  # rebuild the world graph from Natural Earth (1:10m)
npm run coast -- ne.geojson  # rebuild the coastline the browser draws (1:50m)
npm run chart -- out.svg land.geojson [--turns 2000 --flow current --box w,s,e,n --scale 30]

In the browser, ?seed=42 replays an encounter too. Keys: 1 2 3 pick, enter resolve, s break off.

layout

src/
  rng.ts         seeded RNG; its whole state is one integer kept in the game state
  cards.ts       the effect vocabulary and the placeholder decks
  rules.ts       createEncounter, act, legalActions — pure, no I/O
  setup.ts       the one encounter so far: you and a merchant
  describe.ts    words for events and the cards' glossary, shared by terminal and browser
  save.ts        saving a run to the browser, and loading it back
  rules.test.ts
  outfit.ts      ships, crew, upgrades: what your deck is made of
  ui/            Svelte: App (the game), SeaChart, Fight, CardView, Gauge
  world/
    data/        world.json: the world graph, from Natural Earth
    passages.ts  the narrow straits, traced by hand
    ports.ts     the ports of 16XX and their flags
    ocean.ts     currents, rivers, banks, the wind model, the great courses
    drake.ts     Drake's raid round the world, as the places he touched
    geo.ts       the sphere: distances, great circles, headings
    map.ts       the world graph split into days, with ports and features
    sea.ts       currents and wind per node, and how they weigh a leg
    ships.ts     the kinds of ship and how each moves
    rumors.ts    making a rumor, its fading marker, its prediction
    bar.ts       buying rounds, and what the room tells you
    meet.ts      meeting a ship at sea, fighting it, settling up, repairs
    port.ts      hiring, the yard, bribes, and who will deal with you
    wars.ts      who's at war with whom, and so what's fair game
    events.ts    a day at sea: morale and mutiny, storms, omens
    dilemmas.ts  events that ask you something, and what each choice stakes
    scout.ts     the lookout, and a read of a ship before you meet her
    seas.ts      the named seas, where the chart letters them and the monsters keep
    course.ts    setting a course and sailing it a day at a time
    world.ts     createWorld, advance, observe, hearRumor — pure, like rules.ts
cli/
  play.ts        the interactive harness
  sim.ts         bots and their outcome tables
  render.ts      text rendering shared by both

rules.ts knows nothing about drawing. A renderer reads EncounterState and its events log and sends Actions back. The events log is there so a renderer can animate what happened, not just show the new state.

what the simulator says so far

Every bot does the same thing each round: it tries all six ordered keeps one step ahead and takes the best result. The bots differ only in how much they value hull, and whether getting away counts as winning. They count damage waiting in the deck at most of a point each. Ship hull 6, merchant hull 12, over 5,000 seeds:

That was a single fight, tuned with a 6-hull ship. For whole runs the pinnace now has 10 (see balance above), which makes a merchant 81% destroyed and 6% sunk for the balanced bot: npm run sim -- --hull 6 gives the table above back.

How we got here, because the cliffs are the useful part. (This was the first damage model, where all shot became damage cards. It's been replaced by direct damage and wounds; see below.)

• Damage cards spread through the deck at random made you nearly untouchable: 92% destroyed, 4% sunk. Spread out, two of your damage cards almost never shared a hand, and you could always dodge one. Making the merchant hit harder barely changed that.
• Damage cards on top of the deck fixed it. Fire lands in the next hand, so a hurt of 2 forces at least one hit.
• Merchant hull 12 and broadside 4. Damage against the merchant is a good card for you, but it still takes one of your two keeps. Your deck holds a fixed amount of shot, so when the merchant's hull is close to that total, every keep spent on something else costs you. One point past it and the merchant can't be sunk.

Then shot went straight to the hull. Damage cards for every point of shot made fights long (21 rounds) and let you dodge most of what came at you. Now shot lands at once, and only some of it leaves a wound card. Fights are shorter and threat comes sooner, so running matters again: a captain who runs when it can gets away from a merchant a third of the time.

Old open questions from the damage-card model, kept for the record:

• Fleeing hardly matters now. Damage you're owed lands late, so by the time you're threatened the merchant usually is too, and finishing it pays better. Before damage cards, fleeing cut sinking nearly in half; now it saves about one encounter in a hundred.
• Encounters run about 21 rounds, double what they were. Every hit adds cards to the deck.
• A forced flee. Even "never flees" gets away 1% of the time. When a threatened ship is dealt a flee card beside two worse cards, keeping it can be the least bad option. That reads as the crew running whatever you wanted, which may be fine.
• The ships never part. Somebody always flees, sinks or goes down before the deck runs out. The ending is a safety net for now.
• Destroying still pays best. The bounty is usually worth more than the cargo that sinks with the ship.