Recently I’ve finished porting all the 7th Sea CCG sets to OCTGN and like my previous post about Doomtown, I thought I’d make a post on how to  setup and play the game.

First of all an introduction for those not in the know:

The 7th Sea CCG is a defunct collectible card game based around naval combat in all forms. From blasting your opponent’s ship to splinters with your cannons, to boarding them and hacking them to bits. It plays around the common theme of Swashbuckling Pirates and Privateers and thus you do stuff such as send your crew on adventures and generally try to control the 5 seas the game is played in.

Deck building revolves around many things:

• Selecting what faction you want to play, as there are dedicated pirates, army captains, chartered privateers and even the undead, each with their own rich history, story and gameplay tendencies.
• Deciding what basic strategy you’re going to use to achieve victory: Big Cannon Attacks, Small Cannon attacks, Boardings, A bit of this and a bit of that, Controlling the Seas or some other wacky experimental build – like playing the Viking Raiders and using your Laerdom sorcerers to destroy opponent’s ships through weather catastrophes.
• Deciding on the type of cards you’re going to use, as too much of one card might make you strong in your chosen tactic, but might cripple you if you’re ever trapped in a boarding.

And there’s a lot of other fine strategies in deckbuilding that emerge once you start to understand how the game works and the cards interact with each other.

The game is primarily designed for 2 players playing as opponents, but you can easily play it with more, albeit a Free-For-All is not recommended. However some of my fondest experiences with card games were when playing this game as 2 vs 2 team matches.

EDIT @ 02/07/2013 : I’ve moved the installation instructions on to the dedicated page for this game definition. Please follow the step-by-step installation instructions for 7th Sea CCG there.

Now that we have the game ready, the only thing that is left is to find someone to play with. Fortunately, the new OCTGN 3 has a built-in game lobby capability, which means that whenever you go to the host/join tab, you’ll see any available game lobbies for the games you have installed, and if you host a game, anyone with the same game can see it and join. Unfortunately the 7th Sea CCG is even less active than Doomtown which means it is unlikely anyone will be hosting or looking to join a game at the same moment you are. Even worse, there’s not even a specific community for the 7th Sea CCG. There’s a Facebook group with 4 people (at this time) which you might ask in, A Facebook page with more fans, but related to all things 7th Sea, which for most people is only the RPG, and of course our own OCTGN Game fora where you may inquire if anyone if up for a game. But very likely, your best bet would be to contact me directly 😉

The 7th Sea CCG version for OCTGN is not yet as automated as Doomtown, mostly because I “power” my motivation to code this stuff depending on how much I actually play the game and thus see areas for streamlining and improvement. Given that I haven’t managed to find a single person to play with (something which I hope to change with this post), it’s no surprise that the scripting behind it is minimal. Still, I do plan to improve it as much as I can, even if I don’t play much personally. Eventually I hope to make it as streamlined to play as possible and take away much of the “carpal-tunnel” tediousness that online play introduces to card games as well as help players avoid common mistakes done while playing complex games.

If you do get to play a game with your friends and find things that annoy or could simply be improved, do contact me and I’ll work on it as soon as possible. And of course, spread the word.

Enjoy!