A Few Suggestions...

[OrigamiGuy]

First of all, great game. The premise is fun, the gameplay is very good, and the strategic potential looks very promising. I hope to waste many, many hours on the final version: I've only played through the demo so far. That said, I've a few suggestions:

• Modify the board so that the corner islands are touching two hexes, not just one. It's been far too easy in my games to simply place three men in a boat and blockade the entrance to an island the computer goes for. Case in point: I once brought myself back from a 5-point deficit by moving a boat with king, prince, and peasant into the only island entrance. The computer players had two full boats that could do nothing but row back and forth, at least until I brought in an octopus and then ran over the swimmers with my boat .
• Rather than killing swimmers with boats, perhaps institute some kind of "majority rules" procedure, or some such. As it is now, if I control a boat with two men and a third computer player, any one of my men I run over will die. Change the rules so that when I move from one hex in the boat to another with one of my swimmers, my men boot the third man from the boat and pick up their own guy. I end up with three men in a boat, but the computer person is left in the water in the previous hex. Majority rules. It will make it less advantageous to hitch a ride in a boat with two unfriendly guys.
• Change the rules for moving monsters. The demo I've been playing makes almost no use of the sharks, and the sea monsters are completely abused as weapons. Perhaps change the random numbers so that sea monsters always move one or two squares, octopi between one and three, and sharks up to four. The monster to be moved is still random, but allowing a more predictable type of movement will help up the tempo of the game, and sharks would play a better role if they were faster.
• Treat swimmers like boats. When three swimmers are in the same hex, have them band together for safety, so that they move as one unit. A group of swimmers would then become like a much weaker version of boats: They still take three turns to move one hex, but they HAVE to band together to keep from sinking, no matter what color the three swimmers are. The method of control would be the same as for boats. It would just be a much slower type of boat that could also be eaten by sharks, which would work out nicely with the point I made above.
• Make the whirlpool sound shorter. It gets annoying when I'm trying to think of whom to eat with my sea monster, but all I can hear is the whirlpool sound that seems to go on forever . Two or three seconds is plenty.
  
  That's what I have for now. Once again, amazing job on the game. It's the best beta version of anything I've played, and the final version should be amazing.

[Sean OConnor]

Thanks for the suggestions but I do want to keep the rules as similar as possible to the original board game. The rule that swimmers get run over by boats if there is no room to pick them up is really because there just isn't space on the screen to draw swimmers as well as boats and people in them.

I agree that the whirlpool sound is too long. I'll have to get hold of a program that can cut it down in length and fade out towards the end - not just stop suddenly.

[OrigamiGuy]

Audacity is a great freeware sound utility. You can open up a sound file and view its waveform, then do all the cut, fade, paste, and insert you want. I use it to take the background music from my favorite video games and convert it into CD tracks.

Here's the link.

[vinaymehta]

Thank you for all informative suggestions. Now, I understand all the updated rules or features of this game because of you. You explained each topic with so much conviction. I highly appreciate this post. It’s hard to find the good from the bad sometimes, but I think you’ve nailed it!