When playing with what the rulebook refers to as "optional advanced mechanics", Boarding is available as an alternative way of attacking enemy ships. Boarding can be done when a player ship is adjacent to an enemy ship, and the procedure is as follows:
1. Place the Enemy Ship Board next to the On Deck area of the player who initiates the Boarding. Spawn enemies with a total Act value equal to the current Act, and roll the Fate Die to determine what positions on the Enemy Ship Board they occupy.
2. The two ships are now treated as one big On Deck area, with the three closest Zones on each ship being connected to each other. (TO CHECK: does this matter? Doesn't crew movement move crew members from any Zone to any other Zone?)
3. The player activates as many Crew members as they wish, moving them to a Node and triggering a Fray if applicable. No Orders are spent to do this, and not all Crew members need to be activated.
4. All enemies activate and resolve their actions.
5. If there are still enemies and Crew members alive, go to 3.
6. If all enemies have been defeated, the player collects as many Spoils as the current Act number, and the enemy ship is then removed from the Game Board. The enemy ship doesn't leave a Shipwreck behind. (Note: the rulebook has a misprint regarding the rewards, saying to collect rewards as described in a text box on the ship's Enemy Card, but there is no such information there. Grimlord Games have confirmed this is a misprint.)
7. If all Crew members were killed, the player's ship is sunk.
Note: the rulebook doesn't explicitly says what happens at the end of a successful Boarding, but the FAQ published by
but since other such minigames, like Visit a Port and Exhaustive Expedition, end with the Crew members being returned to any Below Deck spaces the player chooses, it seems reasonable to do that after Boarding as well.
Player Ship Sinking
There is no player elimination in The Everrain; the game continues until all players win or all players lose collectively. If a player's ship is sunk, or if the player loses all Crew members, the old ship becomes a Shipwreck, and the player respawns with a new ship at the nearest unoccupied Port. The procedure for this is:
- Refresh all the Order tokens. Discard all Crew members, coins, Schematics, half your Clues and all except one Treasure. Discard (not banish) any enemies On Deck. (You get to keep all Improvements and Artillery you may have.)
- Remove the ship from the Game Board, replace it with a Shipwreck token. Place your remaining Clues and Treasures on the Shipwreck token (these can be claimed as loot later). Place your ship minature on your Ship Board. Note: while the Shipwreck token is of a similar size and shape as a one-hex Storm token, unlike the Storm token, the Shipwreck token doesn't disable the function of the map space under it.
- Advance the Elder One token (not the Enemy Discovery token) one step (towards lower numbers) on the Discovery Track.
- On your next turn, place your ship at the closest unoccupied Port from where you sunk, collect 1 Deckhand at random, 20 coins and then take your Turn as usual.
Note: the rulebook doesn't say anything about what to do with installed Upgrades in this case, neither to discard them, nor to put any new Upgrades on the new ship, so unless Grimlord Games clarifies this otherwise, it seems reasonable from a gameplay perspective to assume that the Upgrades are transferred to the new ship.