The kiddo and I have started playtesting Frigates and Fireballs! with two games under our belts now. There’s been some iteration between the two games and some useful findings, but more than anything: he loves the game. It’s fun, straightforward, and he got to have dragons set my boats on fire. Pretty easy recipe for success.

But first: a quick level set. This is a work in progress ruleset intended for convention play. People show up, learn it, have fun, and then probably only play it again if another convention rolls around. It might also work as a beer and pretzels fantasy ship game. For now, it’s realistically just a game I’ll play with my son. So: fast, silly, and you cast lots of spells.

Specifically, you cast those spells by rolling your magic dice at the start of the game and assigning them to a magic board. Example below.

I used AI in producing the list and magic board builder for the game. You’ll see many signs of it if you look and I won’t deny it. Moving on.

I’m going to focus on what I got out of each playtest rather than summarizing the games.

Game 1 Learnings

This match saw us racing to survey 5 tokens (survey spots) around the board. First to survey all of them won. Neither of us achieved this. The game saw a lot of back and forth fire and magic. Some highlights include my son repeatedly using the Wave spell to make my ships collide with islands, or my meteor taking down two ships at once to keep me in the game.

We actually didn’t survey all of the spots because both sides were too slow moving and we nearly wiped each other out on turn six. At first, I thought the game wasn’t very lethal, but we’ll see in the next match that I was wrong. In fact, I just made ships a touch too slow, so it took too long to get into decent shooting range.

We also had my son use a Storm spell, which is a “Special” spell. You can only have one on your board and they’re hard to cast. It uh… did nothing. The idea was for it to be a big dramatic storm that placed all sailing ships into headwind, which would stop them from moving at Full Sail. By the time he cast it, I was moving Battle Speed anyway and for the one or two ships that needed Full Sail, I had the Magic Wind spell to counter the Storm and allow my ships to move normally. So, lesson learned: go bigger with the Specials.

Some minor spell tweaks aside, we also played this game without the Channeling Crystal. This is a crystal hidden on one ship on your side of the board, which grants rerolls for your Magic Dice that you assign to your Magic Board at the start of each turn. They help to control the randomness. If you lose this ship, you lose the dice and additional force morale, bringing you closer to defeat and making you have less control over your magic.

Without the Channeling Crystal rule, I found that the game was missing something. So, we added it back for the next game. I’d summarize the three biggest learnings as:

1. Make big spells bigger
2. Fix movement speeds to be faster
3. Fix ironclads: I made the skill too expensive for what it granted
4. Fix Headwind: I made it relatively easy to ignore, so I made it a bit worse and actually adding the concept of Tacking into movement
5. Use the Channeling Crystal rule

Game 2 Learnings

Game two saw us competing to be in the right place at the right time. Basically, stand in the three magic circles to control them and score VP. Pretty classic objective, made a little harder by ship momentum. It was fun!

Turn one my son launched a Dragonflight at me, severely damaging two ships. Graciously, I had a Recovery spell queued up to heal myself back into the game, but it set him up to take that flank with ease!

The next great move he pulled was to use Magic Missile correctly. As a gag, this does not launch a magic projectile: it launches your ship. He took a sloop and sent it hurdling into a frigate, destroying both ships in the process. He was super pleased with himself.

As for learnings, the updated speed made the game much faster moving and exposed the lethality of the dice system. We’ve toned it down for the future. We also found a few spells need a small bump in power level or utility. For example: Fireball was disappointingly mild.

The Channeling Crystal was great! It worked both as a “Man, which ship is it?!” and it helped greatly with making the Magic Boards more predictable. So long as your Crystal is intact you get to reroll up to 2 dice. What we found, really, was that we should bump that up to 4 dice. Two helped a lot, but I think four would lend a little more reliability, so if you really want a certain spell, there’s a better chance you can nail it. The balance is that I don’t want to make Specials too easy to get to. Last thing you want is someone summoning a Kraken every turn.

Lethality aside, I felt this match actually went quite well. The other finding was more in a post game conversation: what if someone stacked all of the healing spells on one board? What if they stacked all of the damage spells? As it stands, you can make boards freely. I may have to think through simple restrictions, or actually build factions for the game down the line.

I’ve had a lot of debate lately elsewhere about whether or not factions are necessary and healthy for a game. I’m not sure this is the game where I want to care, but it’s a fair point. I may eventually drift into the concept of “Spell Books” that limit your spell options, but still allow people to make navies to their pleasing. We’ll see. I’m not even sure if this will be free or $5 or Pay What You Want or what.

Mostly, it’s just been fun. My son asked me if we would just play it a few times and move on, with a disappointed look on his face at the idea. He loves it and wants to play it a ton more. I’ll call that a win. Honestly, I’ll probably let him decide on the factions vice spellbooks vice full free form construction.

As for our learnings to take into game 3:

1. To Hit values have all been reduced by 1 to make us hit 16% less. Will tune from there.
2. Crystals now provide 4 rerolls instead of 2.
3. We’ll properly test Morale next time.

I’m happy with this list, really. After game 3 I think the next playtest will revolve around further customizing ships. Some should be faster, some should be harder hitting. We need to play around and try to break things a bit more. After another few games, I might actually bring this one to the adults and get more robust feedback than what the 11 year old can offer.

Oh, and more ships. I’ve got both Ship of the Line sized ships and Cutters to print and paint! I should be sick of ships by November.

…Assuming I don’t find good dwarf ships to print off…