About Sea Shanties, from BoardGameGeek:
Sea Shanties is a pirate-themed strategy game for 3-5 players. Players will compete to be the most renowned captain to ever sail the Kanvus Sea. In doing so, players will plunder islands for valuable loot, pillage loot from other captains using a unique sea battle mechanic, and complete objectives to write shanties that will become their legacy once Davy Jones takes his toll.
Sea Shanties' environmentally friendly design utilizes dynamic board tiles printed on canvas. There are over a duodecillion different configurations of the board, meaning you will never play on the same board twice!
Players start with 15 crew and a ship token on a starting island, selected by a draft. Players have 5 additional crew tokens in Hunter's Tavern.
Every captain's turn has three phases - Actions, then Bury, then Collect (ABC). During the action phase, captains may take up to 5 actions. The five available actions are Sail (Move their ship token to an adjacent square on the board, utilizing wind arrows), Plunder (place crew tokens from your player board onto an island that your ship token occupies), Abandon (remove all of your tokens from an island that your ship token does not occupy and place them in Hunter's Tavern), Recruit (place one crew token from Hunters Tavern onto your player board), and Sea Battle (initiate a battle with another captain's if their ship is in an adjacent square).
After the action phase, captains may Bury their loot that they had on their ship. Buried loot cannot be pillaged in sea battles. Once that phase is done, players may then Collect 1 loot per loot-producing island they control, collect any Ballads if they have buried the most of a particular type of loot, and collect one verse if they completed the specified objective on it.
Sea Battles are an augmented Prisoner's Dilemmah. Captains will secretly select a number on the battle dial between 0 and the number of crew tokens they have on their captain's placards (not on in the tavern or on islands). They will simultaneously reveal their selected numbers. The highest number wins and may pillage loot tokens from the loser equal to the difference of the two selected numbers. The winner will also have to surrender crew to the tavern equal to the difference. Lastly, the winner gets a Fear loot chit. Do you send all of your crew to battle, knowing that the opposer might select a low number and you lose most of your crew?
Once all of the shanties have been sung, the player with the most Renown Points wins!
-description from the publisher
