Greetings, fellow sentient beings! Explorers and researchers, designers and builders, hunters and craftspeople! And gamers! And the rest!

This be a new update report about recent changes in the game design of Western Shores, a game where you shall take the part of Viking leaders exploring the Unknown in search of glory.

The background is a part of an illustration I made of a fictional Greenland harbor.

Or is it real? Was it? Is it?

Changes:

Map orientation

Previously, each player could place a maximum of 6x6 cards as tiles on one's map, provided each tile had the proper border matching the terrain type, land, water, or a combination of both, of each of its neighbouring (called adjacent) tiles. But the water-to-land card borders were oriented up-down or down-up which led to the problem of too much space needed in front of each player. The game could only be played on a rather large table.

Not acceptable.

So, I am experimenting with another idea — The map shall now be 6x5 tiles max, and shores shall face left or right, i.e. east or west if we assume that Up is the Geographical North.

And the game is called western shores, after all. Building your map to what feels like its west is only appropriate.

Scoring changes

The bonus for 6 tiles in each dimension is no longer possible. Only the horizontal stretch bonus
remains.

Card Mechanics and Total Card Count

Some slight changes occurred in order to make certain cards more attractive. For example, Whales draw cards, Temptresses (working title) draw cards but at the cost of ships being discarded from the player's map, the unique Frozen Elf and Frozen Mammoth now work in a completely different way than before that still represents the patience you need in order to benefit from them. Yeah, it's about card draw again.

There are now 52 starter cards for 4 players and 81 cards that can be drafted during the course of the game. Among all the cards, about 60 unique names appear.

Initial Setup

Since previously we had situations where players skip their turns during the lack of any possible move, some of the buildings from the starter deck are directly placed on the map during Setup. It's a combination of two of the player's choice from among:

Lumber Site, Lumber Site, Farm, Smithy, Homestead.

Duration

The above and more changes are also done with the goal to reduce the time needed for a single game of Western Shores in mind. A playtest is all right to continue 4 hours but a real game shouldn't be that long.

Unless the players are drunk, stoned, the faith of the world is at stake, or all three apply.

We are aiming at about an hour or so. Less than two, anyway.

Well, that's all about the last updates that I am ready to reveal right now. I am also considering a browser game version but that shall be quite different from the board game. Except it will be the same cards in terms of flavor.

Thank you for being with us! If you want to support the project, you can directly donate to the account @thewesternshores or look for rare collectible art when it comes out. Some of it is already on NFTshowroom.com where you can find it by looking for the tag #thewesternshores or #westernshores.

The account @thewesternshores shall be set up as a beneficiary of this post.

Our lead illustrator is @silver.art whom you can follow in order to see most of the illustrations nearly as soon as they are ready.

Favorable winds!

Yours,

Manol Donchev