Corsair Delivery Service
A co-operative tactical board game for one to four players.
1–4 couriers · 60 to 90 minutes · co-operative · box planned in English and German
Want to hear when it starts? Put your name down a little further along
Deliver the cargo in one piece, get the crew back aboard and be gone while everyone is still standing.
The jobs that never make the ledgers
What the Guild of the Fernwasser Corsairs does openly goes in the ledgers: cargo delivered, workers moved, Seatran shipped. Nobody else can read that raging sea, so nobody else gets the work. Your crew also runs the jobs that never make the ledgers. Sometimes a shipment is not meant to arrive, sometimes a rig out on the reef is meant to go quiet overnight, sometimes a crate has to reach a dock without anyone ever knowing it was in transit. Out on the water nobody can touch you, because nobody could follow you in the first place. The cover ends when you tie up. Whatever you are carrying has to change hands ashore, and ashore is the one place anyone can reach you. Those hours between tying up and casting off are what this game is about.
What a die leaves open to you
No roll here ever fails. The number never decides whether something works, only which version of an action it opens up, so you are not rolling for success, you are rolling for choice. The only thing that limits you is how many dice you hold, and since no two characters play alike, no two crews call for the same approach. Missing the number you desperately needed is not the end of it: give a die up and its value shifts the ones you have already placed.
You always know what is coming
Your enemies show their hand at the start of the round, so you know what is coming and only have to work out who stops it and what has to go undone. The pressure does not let up either: anyone you leave standing is back next round, and not alone.
Who you are is printed on your board.
Vera
“Cold Patience” · Gunner
Fifty years at sea, and age has taken her eyes. It has not taken her off the water. What Fernwasser teaches in seven years, Fox is picking up from her between one job and the next: how to read the sea.
Andre
“Free Passage” · Boarder
In Malngard he had everything but a reason, and for a long time he could not say what pulled him away. He found it at the very front, where the line draws tight and others give ground, the open water and no one above him. Of everyone in the crew, he carries the work most lightly.
Fox
“Easy Game” · Smuggler
She never had papers, and no one gave her a name, so she took her own. She grew up in the sliver of room a person without a past carves out, and she plays it like no one else. She gave herself away by stepping into a fight instead of staying hidden, and now, for the first time, she is somewhere no one asks where she is from, only what she can do.
Tamir
“Full Flavour” · Cook
Tamir is young, out of Vonda, and he wanted nothing more than to get out, to cook, and to see that there are better places than the one he came from. He never wanted the fighting and still does not like it, but he has learned to stand up for the people at his table. It is not the battle that drives him, but the ones he fights it for.
Kaya
“Bright Spark” · Pressuress
Kaya is young, out of Ondare, an engineer because she wanted to build something that counts. Her work is not the open blow but what comes before it: barricades that force the enemy onto her paths, and traps that make those paths expensive. She believes in the guild openly, in a trade that took that belief from most of its people long ago.
Roman
“Clean Cut” · Surgeon
Roman is from Radowa, and for as long as he can remember he wanted to be one thing only: a doctor. He knew the craft to his fingertips, but under pressure his hands shook, and for all his knowledge he stayed a poor one. Today he is the steadiest man in the crew; what that steadiness cost him does not show, and he does not talk about it.