T w e n t y S i d e d

So I think I’ve grasped the core strategy behind winning naval battles, if strategy’s not too grandiose a word for “having some bombs.” And now that I’ve got a ship that wasn’t designed for running mail, I’m happy to get past all this fussy tutorial-area low-grade busywork and just get to the horse racing already. I mean, what gives? I’m hours into this 17th century pirate sandbox and I haven’t seen one goddamn racetrack yet.

But oh boy, I sure have been hearing about “the races” from every single Suspicious Man I’ve been to thus far. It is literally the first dialogue I encountered in the game. Like, here’s a small sample of things I learned after I found out that the Caribbean(!)’s secret underground racing circuit was being held in Fort Jacob:

• Where to hire a crew
• Where to find jobs
• How most of my skills work
• How to sail a ship
• How to fire a cannon
• That I have made a terrible mistake
• What a “hanger” is

So you know what? Let’s see what the fuss is all about. Get ready to watch some nameless awkwardly-costumed NPCs trot around a track and bet imaginary money on the arbitrary outcome, because that is almost certainly what we’re in for. I mean, did they just have a track they used for testing horses and they figured they might as well—

Weevil my biscuits, they actually made a racing minigame. They took a clunky knight simulator and made a clunkier pirate simulator and then threw in a racing minigame. Obviously, we are going to drop everything we’re doing and play the racing minigame.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Nan o’ War CH13: Debrisbiscuit”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

The downside of playing on the difficulty where you don’t automatically save when you quit is that—without getting too technical about the mechanics—you don’t automatically save when you quit. So that grand victory that took five hundred precise mouse clicks to score took precisely zero to foul up. My finest moment just unhappened.

Let this be a life lesson, folks! Don’t savescum halfway. Punch your pitons of destiny into every inch of that mountain of tribulations. Just captured a ship? Treat yourself to a save. Found some buried treasure? Why not save! Won a battle with the hardtack shits? Save that game.

The prospect of beating those smugglers again and regaining all the extra crew and funds and levels and backup ships is daunting. It’s so daunting, in fact, that I’m going to skip it and just go attack a War Brigantine instead.

What’s a War Brigantine? Let’s start with “twice the size of my ship.” Let’s move on to the modifier, “War.” As in, “In this brave new world of naval trade and exploration, we killed half a forest so some upper class twit could feed fishes the hard way and we dare you to try stopping us.” You know what my ship’s qualifying word is? “Large.” As in “Large Sloop.” As in, “As far as sloops go, this one’s large. You could almost fit a pool table on here.”

Jesus. Here goes nothing.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Nan o’ War CH12: Bomb Voyage”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.