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Root publisher reveals pirate-themed adventure board game, Ahoy

Adapted from previously cancelled Kickstarter game Hyperspace Smuggler.

Image credit: Leder Games

Leder Games, the studio behind board games such as Root and Fort, has announced that it will be publishing a new pirate-themed title called Ahoy.

Unveiled in a tweet from Leder Games CEO Patrick Leder, the upcoming board game will see players sailing on the high seas as buccaneers in an adventure game about “piracy, rebellion, smuggling and control”.

According to Leder, Ahoy is going to be an asymmetric game - meaning that players have differing abilities and/or objectives - with Nick Brachmann, who worked on last year’s Fort, helping to develop the game. Cole Wehrle - creator of Root and the upcoming Oath - will also be involved in developing Ahoy, as well as handling project management for the board game.

Ahoy is based on Hyperspace Smuggler, a tile-laying board game that saw players become spaceship captains carrying illegal cargo. The game was designed to support two to four players and focused on having players explore, and interact with, a complete science-fiction world. A Kickstarter campaign for the title was launched in February 2016, but cancelled a month later after it failed to raise less than 20% of its funding.

In an update on the Kickstarter campaign page for Hyperspace Smuggler, creator Greg Loring-Albright revealed that the game had initially intended to have a pirate theme before it was changed into a space opera title. With the announcement of Ahoy, the Kickstarter campaign for Hyperspace Smuggler will no longer be receiving any updates.

Besides Ahoy, Loring-Albright is responsible for creating asymmetric two-player game Leviathan, which centres around a sea battle between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick, the nemeses from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel. In the game, one player commands Ahab’s whaling fleet, whilst the other takes control of the enormous mammal itself - whichever player destroys the other first is named the winner.

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Last December, Leder Games unveiled plans for a fourth expansion for Root, which will introduce a new rat Warlord faction - focused around ruling the game board’s different clearings - and a militant badger faction that will provide players with a slower and more thoughtful style of play. The Kickstarter campaign for the upcoming expansion will launch sometime early this year.

Leder Games is yet to confirm when Ahoy will be released or whether it will have its own Kickstarter campaign.

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Alex Meehan avatar
Alex Meehan: After writing for Kotaku UK, Waypoint and Official Xbox Magazine, Alex became a member of the Dicebreaker editorial family. Having been producing news, features, previews and opinion pieces for Dicebreaker for the past three years, Alex has had plenty of opportunity to indulge in her love of meaty strategy board games and gothic RPGS. Besides writing, Alex appears in Dicebreaker’s D&D actual play series Storybreakers and haunts the occasional stream on the Dicebreaker YouTube channel.
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Ahoy

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