Below Deck

The Below Deck is an area on each player's Ship Board, where Crew members are placed when they are not On Deck. The Below Deck area is also the place where ship Improvements are installed.

The Below Deck area is divided into six slots, where each slot can contain one Improvement. Some Improvements have marked circles on them; those are Crew effect spaces where some effect or bonus can be activated by placing a Crew member. Only one Crew member can be in the same Crew effect space at the same time. Crew members can be placed either in such Crew effect spaces, or elsewhere on the Improvement card, or on a blank slot where no Improvement has yet been installed. When not placed in a Crew effect space, the Crew member still counts as being Below Deck.

When moving Crew members onto Below Deck Crew effect spaces, it can trigger the benefit of that space if the Crew member is not Fatigued. If the Crew member triggers a benefit in this way, it becomes Fatigued. Fatigue is removed at the beginning of the Player Phase, so this effectively limits each of your Crew members to taking only one Fatigue-causing action per Turn.

Ship Board

The Ship Board is where a player keeps track of the status of their ship and Crew. The Ship Board has multiple areas on it: the On Deck area, the Below Deck area, the Artillery area, the Hold slot, the Story slot, the Passenger slot, the Fresh Order area, the Issued Orders area, and marked slots along the right edge of the Ship Board where up to four Crew members can be placed.

The On Deck area contains Zones with Nodes that can be manned with Crew to unlock various actions/bonuses. However, at sea, Crew members that are On Deck when a player's turn ends each receive one Strain (unless there is some Trait or other effect that says otherwise).

The Below Deck area contains six slots where Improvements can be installed. At the start of the game, each player gets two free Improvements: one Cabins and one Dinghy, leaving four slots open for additional Improvements. However, if all slots are full, it is possible to discard old Improvements to make room for new one

Some Improvements have spaces marked with circles, similar to the Nodes in the On Deck Zones, but called Crew Effect Spaces. These can work in different ways for different Improvements, and is described on the cards, but those that trigger a specific event for a specific Crew members, such as "Recover 1 Strain" (on Cabins) will cause the Crew member to become Fatigued, and if the Crew member was already Fatigued, the action will not happen.

Note: a few Improvements, such as Cabins, have partial circles in addition to the circle in the middle of the card. By acquiring additional copies of the same Improvement and placing it next to the first one, such partial circles can be made whole, and open up an extra Crew Effect Space.

The Artillery area has three slots: Port, Bow/Stern and Starboard. Artillery Upgrades are often limited in what slot can be installed in, and a Crew member must be placed on a corresponding Artillery Node On Deck in order to perform an attack. Note that there is one shared slot for Bow/Stern, but there are separate Artillery Nodes for Bow and Stern, so while an Artillery Upgrade in that slot can be used for shooting forwards OR backwards, shooting forward requires that the Bow Artillery Node is manned, and shooting backward requires that the Stern Artillery Node is manned.

The Hold slot is used to keep Treasures. By default, the Hold capacity is limited to three Treasures, but Upgrades can increase this.

The Story slot is used to keep Story Cards.

The Passenger slot is used to keep Passenger-type Denizen cards. There is no limit on how many cards can be in this slot, but the number of Passengers is still limited because for each Passenger card, the player must place a Passenger token in a Crew Effect space in a Cabin Improvement.

The Clue area is a storage area for Clue tokens. These are gained in various ways, for example by exploring, and they are used by the UNIVERSITY action when you Visit a Port to pay for advancing the Player Discovery token on the Discovery Track.

The Fresh Orders and Issued Orders are spaces where you keep your Order tokens. Fresh Orders are available for use, while Issued Orders have been spent and can't be used again until they are refreshed. The number of orders a player can issue during a turn is only limited by the number of available Fresh Order tokens, but only a limited number of them are refreshed in each Player Phase.

On the right side of the Ship Board are spaces for Crew Boards for the Crew members you recruit. Each player initially gets two random Deckhands, and a player can't have more than four Crew members.