Lifeboats: Plank of Carneades
Lifeboats: Plank of Carneades Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Components
- 1 Game Board
- 8 Lifeboats
- 1 Starting Player Helm Token
- 7 Player Aid Cards
- 14 Captain Tokens (7 colors, 2 of each)
- 35 Pirate Tokens (7 colors, 5 of each)
- 21 Captain Voting Cards
- 56 Pirate Voting Cards (8 colors, 7 of each)
- 15 Leak Tokens
- 1 Hourglass (2-minute timer)
- 1 Bag
- 1 Sticker Sheet
- Instruction Book
Objective
Your goal is to rescue your crew and get them onto the island. Unfortunately, some of the Lifeboats have already begun taking on water, and may not hold together long enough to reach land. Whenever one of your own colored Crew Tokens (Pirates and Captains alike) reaches the island, you score points — and whoever ends up with the highest score wins the game!
Setup
Before playing for the first time, apply the sticker sheet's images to the matching-colored Captain Tokens.
Setup (shown here for a 4-player game):
- Place the Game Board in the center of the table.
- Each player chooses a color and takes the matching-colored Lifeboat and 2 Captain Tokens, then takes Pirate Tokens of their color according to the player count: 3-4 players each take 5 Pirate Tokens; 5-7 players each take 4 Pirate Tokens.
- Based on the colors chosen by the players in step 2, each player takes one Pirate Voting Card of each of those colors, plus one black Pirate Voting Card and three Captain Voting Cards, to form their hand.
- Place the Leak Tokens and the Black Boat next to the Game Board.
- Each player takes 1 Player Aid Card.
- The player who most recently went swimming becomes the Starting Player for the first round; if this cannot be determined, choose the Starting Player at random. That player then takes the Helm Token (Starting Player Token) and the Hourglass.
Starting the Game
Starting with the Starting Player, all players in turn (clockwise) place their Lifeboat on the Game Board. Players may freely choose their starting position, but only one boat may occupy each starting space. The Starting Player then places the Black Boat on one of the remaining empty starting spaces.
Starting again with the Starting Player and proceeding clockwise, each player places one Crew Token (a Pirate or a Captain) onto a seat on any Lifeboat. Repeat this until all Pirate and Captain Tokens have been placed onto the boats.
Note: if this is your first time playing, we recommend randomly placing all the boats (including the Black Boat) onto the starting spaces on the Game Board, in left-to-right order. Then place all players' Crew Tokens into the bag, and draw them out one at a time, placing each one onto a boat starting from the leftmost boat and moving right. After a Crew Token has been placed on the rightmost boat, continue drawing tokens and placing them starting again from the leftmost boat, repeating until the bag is empty.
Each game is played over several rounds, and each round consists of three phases:
- Phase 1: Boats Take On Water (Leak)
- Phase 2: One Boat Moves Toward the Island
- Phase 3: Pirates Change Boats
After Phase 3 is complete, a new round begins: the previous round's Starting Player passes the Helm Token to the player on their left, who becomes the new Starting Player. The game ends when only one boat remains afloat on the Game Board. Most decisions in this game are settled by vote.
Life and death are a matter of fate! Even the most vicious pirates are no exception.
Voting
Whatever the situation calling for a vote, each player plays one card from their hand face-down. The color of a Pirate Voting Card represents the boat and crew of that same color.
Important! Not every vote involves every color of boat or crew. Therefore, the card a player plays in a vote must be one of the colors involved in that vote, otherwise it is treated as an invalid vote.
Once all players have played a card, everyone reveals their cards together, and the result is settled by majority rule. If there is a tie for the majority, the Starting Player decides which of the tied colors is considered the majority.
As long as a player has not yet placed their card on the table, the other players may still try to influence their choice.
To save their own skin, it's only natural that even friends make promises they don't intend to keep. And for pirates, honesty was never a virtue to begin with!
Time is the only thing standing between you and escape. With jagged rocks and rough seas all around, do the survivors really have time to spare for arguing? For this reason, before every vote, the Starting Player must flip the Hourglass. Once time runs out, players may no longer discuss, and anyone who hasn't yet played a card must do so immediately.
Besides Pirate Voting Cards, players may also play a Captain Voting Card. A Captain Voting Card can override the current vote's majority-rule result (see the Captain Voting Cards section for details). A played Pirate Voting Card may still be taken back before the reveal, but each Captain Voting Card may only be played once, and is removed from the game after the vote is resolved.
Phase 1: Boats Take On Water (Leak)
The Lifeboats stowed aboard the pirate ship were never meant to be relied on in a real shipwreck — how could they hold up? Years of neglect have left them worn and battered.
When a Lifeboat is struck by the waves and driven onto the rocks, its hull is bound to be damaged and start leaking. During this phase, all players vote on which boat springs a leak. Whichever color receives the most votes is considered to have sprung a leak: place 1 Leak Token on that boat to mark it. If the chosen boat still has an empty seat, place the Leak Token there.
From then on, that seat is flooded and no Crew Token may be placed there for the rest of the game. If the chosen boat is already full, one of its crew must abandon ship! This calls for another vote, but only players who have a Crew Token aboard that boat may take part. To make this easier to track, players may place the Leak Token in front of that boat.
Note that each Captain aboard the boat counts as 2 votes (a Captain's influence being considerable, of course they get 2 votes), while each Pirate only gets 1 vote.
Example: The Black Boat is chosen, so a vote is held to decide which crew member must leave the boat. Since there is no red crew aboard, the red player may not take part in this vote. When the played cards are revealed, yellow receives 4 votes, green receives 3, and purple receives 1. As a result, a yellow crew member must leave the Lifeboat.
If the player who must lose a crew member has both a Captain and a Pirate aboard the chosen boat, the Pirate must leave first. In short, a Captain will only ever leave the boat if a player has no other crew member left to choose. After all, Captains are seasoned old hands — no crew member can pull one over on them, so a Captain always looks out for themselves first! Place the Leak Token in the now-empty seat.
Sinking
If a boat takes on too many leaks, the crew can't bail water fast enough, and naturally, the boat will sink. At the end of any phase, if a boat has more Leak Tokens than Crew Tokens, that boat is considered sunk. Remove that boat, along with all the crew and Leak Tokens it carries, from the Game Board.
Phase 2: One Boat Moves Toward the Island
While the pirates struggle against the rising water, the outline of an island appears on the horizon, rekindling hope of a successful escape. Players vote to decide which boat moves forward one space toward the island. However, any boat with at least 1 Leak Token instead moves two spaces when it advances. Once a boat reaches the shore, the crew it carries is placed on the island, and the boat itself is set aside next to the board. As more Lifeboats reach the island afterward, place them in order, so it's easy to tell in what order the boats made landfall.
Full Speed Ahead!
"Sh– shark!" someone shouts from behind you — but a moment later, whoever shouted has already been dragged under by the massive shark! Realizing the danger, all you can think about is rowing with everything you've got, racing for the distant island!
Whenever a boat carrying a Leak Token moves toward the island, the following round's leak vote involves two boats springing a leak instead of one. Voting proceeds as normal, but this time, both the boat with the most votes and the boat with the second-most votes each receive 1 Leak Token.
If the vote results in two crew members having to leave their boats, players should first vote on which crew member leaves the boat that received the most votes, resolve that, and only then hold the same vote for the boat with the second-most votes. If there is a tie, the current Starting Player decides which of the tied colors counts as the majority.
Example: The Yellow Boat and the Red Boat both receive two votes, so each receives 1 Leak Token, and as a result a crew member must leave both the Yellow Boat and the Red Boat. The current Starting Player decides which of the two boats holds its vote first.
Example: All 4 votes go to the Yellow Boat. Since there is a tie for second place (with 0 votes each), the current Starting Player decides which of the remaining boats receives the second Leak Token.
Phase 3: Pirates Change Boats
With the boats taking on serious water, abandoning ship becomes an unavoidable choice. It's time to swim for another boat and take your chances.
Starting with the current Starting Player and proceeding clockwise, each player in turn removes 1 Crew Member (a Captain or a Pirate) from any boat, and places it on the Game Board just behind that boat.
Only 1 crew member may be removed from each boat.
If a player has only 1 crew member remaining on a boat, they must keep that lone crew member aboard.
After every player has placed one of their crew members behind a boat (skipping any player who has no crew member they can move), starting with the last player to remove a crew member and proceeding counter-clockwise, each player in turn places the crew member they just removed onto another boat. If that boat has no empty seat, the crew member who cannot find a spot is removed from the game — they have been lost to the sharks!
Remember: at the end of any phase, if a boat has more Leak Tokens than Crew Tokens, that boat sinks.
After Phase 3 ends, the current Starting Player passes the Helm Token to the player on their left, marking the start of a new round.
Example: The Starting Player (Red) removes their Captain from the Yellow Boat, Green removes their Pirate from the Purple Boat, and Purple removes their Pirate from the Green Boat. Since only one crew member may leave each boat, and Yellow has no crew member on any of the other boats, no crew member needs to be moved this round.
Captain Voting Cards
There's only one boss, and no exceptions.
In any vote, a player may choose to play a Captain Voting Card instead. If only one player plays a Captain Voting Card in a given vote, that player alone decides the outcome of the vote.
Note: in a vote that would place 2 Leak Tokens, a player who is the sole one to play a Captain Voting Card may decide to have only 1 Leak Token placed, or even none at all.
Captain Voting Cards are subject to the following three additional rules:
- Once played and resolved, a Captain Voting Card cannot be taken back — in other words, each player has at most three chances over the course of the game to overturn a vote's result.
- If more than 1 Captain Voting Card is played in the same vote, all of those Captain Voting Cards cancel each other out.
- If every player chooses to play a Captain Voting Card, the current Starting Player decides the outcome of that vote.
Scoring and Game End
When only 1 boat remains on the Game Board, it is treated as sunk and the game ends immediately. Each player totals their score. Captains and Pirates who reach different islands score different point values — refer to the icons printed on the Game Board.
The player with the highest total score wins the game. If there is a tie for the highest score, the tied player whose boat reached an island first wins; if the tied players' boats all sank, they share the victory.