Still focusing on lighter games, here’s one that I bought a while back that really appealed to me on multiple levels. It’s set in what its makers call the Golden Age of American whaling, being inspired by the novel Moby Dick. It has a boardgame-like look and the mechanics to match. Plus it rocks some pretty great thematically appropriate sea shanties by a Bristol-based group called the Roaring Trowmen. It’s such an original work so different from anything on the market that I just had to get it.

I have not actually read the novel myself but it’s not hard to understand the premise. You’re the sole survivor of Captain Ahab’s ship and you have inherited his obsession with the giant white sperm whale Moby Dick. Believing yourself cursed unless you can kill the whale, you are determined to hunt it to the ends of the Earth. However as you start off only with a tiny sloop with a crew of three, you must first build up sufficient wealth to buy a bigger, better equipped ship, hone your skills and gather experienced crewmembers before you are able to confront a giant whale that might just be the spawn of Hell. After much preparation can you obtain a magical weapon powerful enough to harm the legendary creature and follow the clues to Moby Dick’s hiding place.

This is indeed a kind of RPG with all of its trappings: experience points to level characters with, quests, each character even has a slot to equip special items. Your crewmembers and your captain as well of course can be assigned to different positions on the ship with their skills giving the appropriate boosts, such as faster speed for example. There are four types of crewmembers: hunters who are good at fighting; sailors who are good at, well, sailing; craftsmen; who can help repair the ship; and scientists who are effectively doctors. The captain is free to pick up skills from any tree though you’re still limited by the number of skills you can have active at a time.

There are a few different types of quests that you can do but the primary way that you make money will always be hunting whales. To do that, you need to find the spots where whales are present, and each such zone is only active for certain months of the year as a mating zone or feeding zone etc. for that species. Hunting itself is carried out as a form of turn-based combat with mechanics that resemble both dice and card games. Each whaleboat carries up to three crewmembers and each crewmember rolls a six-sided die to determine what actions he can do but you can only choose one action per whaleboat. Each whale or other type of enemy can take an action once per turn and that is chosen using cards.

Without going into too much detail, the mechanics are involved enough to be engaging but not really that deep once you understand how things work. The legendary whales with their high hit points and attacks that can throw everyone on a whaleboat overboard seem daunting at first but with a high-level crew, you can cancel their attacks and block their special powers. A bigger concern is that you eventually realize that many skill trees are entirely pointless. Anything that helps you earn money or conserve resources like food or water is ultimately useless as money is easy to obtain by whaling. Even healing faster after combat doesn’t help much as everyone heals to full once you return to a port. The only real challenge in this game is combat so what you really want is a full slate of crewmembers with combat-focused skills. There is a little silliness along the way as you must have crewmembers with some non-combat skills in order to upgrade your ship but it’s easy enough to just keep them around long enough just for the upgrade and then immediately ditch them afterwards.

The main draw for me remains its unique setting. I love how the simple art and sounds at each port is enough to evoke a sense of the place. With your dinky little ship and low skills, it feels scary at first to venture any significant distance from Nantucket but soon enough you’re zooming across the whole world with no fear. Similarly it feels kind of gruesome at the beginning to think that you are really killing whales and spilling their blood into the oceans but like any other game, it soon becomes just another repetitive task and maybe that is a statement too. I enjoyed the text-based adventures in the main quest and side quests as well as they give you a little more flavor about the background.

It’s also good that this is a rather short game that you can get through in probably less than a dozen hours or so. Long enough to fully explore the mechanics and feel immersed in its world but not so long that it wears out its welcome. The shortness also makes it easy to forgive design flaws like the imbalanced skill trees. You might feel tempted to grind your captain to max level but there’s really no point as it is perfectly possible to take down Moby Dick way before that. Anyway I really enjoy short, unique games like this and I’d love to see more stuff like this.