Thar be spoilers ahead!

Welcome aboard shipmates! On the first day of 2017, Dan, Matt and myself had decided to take the plunge into the world of Seafall, designed by Rob Daviau, the “father” of legacy games. Needless to say, the bar for legacy style games has been raised significantly. After the huge success of Pandemic” Legacy, a title that has claimed the top spots on of few league members “Best of 2015” lists, has us curious to discover what Seafall has to offer in its tightly sealed chests of secrets. I will be keeping a log of our plays as we go along in the coming weeks. Thanks for joining us on this epic journey through Seafall. There is potential for spoilers ahead so take this as your final warning. Proceed at your own risk!

Captain’s Log, Entry #1

Prologue

Day 1: Grabbing the helm just after leaving port already has the mates dreaming of what the western sea may hold. Heavy seas and uncharted islands stand in the way but that won’t stop me from obtaining the riches and discoveries this world has to offer. A few of these uncharted isles are very close, we will stop and explore what fruits they may bare.

Day 6: After much heavy sailing we have made it the first island. We found that these islands have once been inhabited by strange and ancient civilizations. Walking among the ruins offers no clues as to who or what they may be. The small group of island inhabitants don’t seem to have any knowledge either. I have planted our province’s flag and named this small archipelago “The Fractured Cay”. Another island is visible on the northern coast. We have purchased some supplies and loaded up the holds. We sail north.

Day 19: We have landed on the northern island. Another province has made claim to the isle and has been dubbed “Ooh-I-Wanna-Take-Yu”. More ruins have been seen that were not unlike the ruins at the Fractured Cay. We were met with some hostility so we have raided and plundered to fill our ships with valuable spices. We head back to port to unload and trade some of these valuable spices. I have underestimated this journey. More exploration, trading and plundering will be required to fund our future endeavors to the west.

The prologue of Seafall offers an introduction to the game’s core actions and how to score coveted glory points. There are four main objectives in the prologue and achieving those objectives allows you to name one of the four starting islands. Everything you do in the prologue will have you naming and stickering things. Whether it be a newly hired advisor or exploring an island, you will be physically and permanently leaving your mark on the game. The focus of the prologue is to familiarize players on how to explore locations and locating entries in the captain’s log. The small entries will leave tell a narrative with a choice for the player to make. I found this to be very similar to “Above and Below” and for the most part, the stories in the prologue were pretty disconnected and did not seem like it was part of a larger narrative. My hope is that on future plays a story will start to take shape.

We took turns sailing, exploring, buying goods and collecting taxes. There was some raiding that happened but not much since there aren’t many locations to raid at the start of the game. In future games we will be given the ability to raid and plunder the ports of our fellow players but is forbidden in the prologue. Once the four milestones have been claimed the prologue ends. Our first shock came when we found out that we were actually playing out a live “history lesson”. The leaders we initially chose are removed from the game which end up representing one of our ancestors. We took the time to choose new leaders from the remaining options and we were ready for our first real game of Seafall.