Seventh Sea (collectible card game)

7th Sea is a defunct collectible card game ("CCG") based on the Swashbuckling Adventures (formerly 7th Sea) role-playing game setting by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG).

Contents

1 Setting 2 Basics 2.1 Terms 2.2 Types of cards 2.3 Deck construction 3 Strategies 4 Gameplay 4.1 Game Start 4.2 Phases of the Game 4.3 Boardings 4.4 Death and Destruction 4.5 Victory 5 Storyline 5.1 Factions 5.2 The Story Arc 5.3 Experience 6 History 6.1 Expansions 6.2 Ghost Ship:The Death of a Game 6.3 The Present 7 External Links

Setting

7th Sea CCG was based on the idea that each player took the role a naval ship captain in the fantasy - renaissance world of Theah. The game really captured a hollywood-like naval battle feeling of those times, with huge galleys throwing volleys of cannon-shot at each other before the boarding, while mixing in other aspects like adventuring and the occult.

As with most of AEG's games, 7th sea had a deep storyline that affected and was affected as well by the RPG setting. Players would affect the storyline with tournaments and cards were designed based on things that happened in the world.

Basics

7th Sea had many interesting concepts, from the multiple winning conditions to the swashbuckling themed combat system. The main things that are worth mentioning are its Deck Building, Rules and Storyline.

Terms

The game used this common terms to specify things

• Faction: There are many factions in the game, almost all crew belong to one or the other but some can be unaligned and thus available to all captain.
• Captain: The leading character of the ship and the single most important crew member. You captain decides you faction.
• Ship: There are many different ships with many different abilities, faction ships can only be taken by a captain of the appropriate faction while unaligned ships are available to all.
• Crew: The rest of the ship's characters. You can have crew from all factions but your starting crew may not be from another faction.
• Seas: The seas your ship moves in.
• Tack: When something is used up, it is turned sideways and cannot be tacked again. Tacking also happens as a result of suffering damage.

Types of cards

There are six types of cards in 7th Sea: Actions, Crew, Adventures, Attachments, Chanteys and Ships. Each card is played differently as expained below

Crew

Most CCG use some kind of card type to produce resources which they subsequently use to gain other items. Usually those resources don't contribute to anything else (Examples of this are lands from Magic:The Gathering and holdings from Legend of the Five Rings. Most games also have some kind of creature type of card that provides offense and defense, like M:TGs creatures and Doomtown's Dudes. 7th Sea took a novel approach by successfully combining both while also providing multiple recourse types and multiple combat procedures, which is something only a few games can boast. The card that provides this, the single most important card in your deck, is crew.

Crew are the sailors you have hired to man the ship. You Captain is a special and important kind of crew but he still performs the same way any other crew does in-game. Crew cards have the following statistics:

• Cost: This is the amount of influence you must provide to hire that crew and a measure of the cards's generic power.
• Faction: This symbol denoted the faction this crew belonged to. Crew without a symbol were unaligned.
• Cannon: How good a shot this crew is with a ship's cannon. Oftenly used as an abstract measure of a crew's firing ability. Cannon can innatively be used to perform Cannon attacks
• Sailing: How well this crew helps the sailing of the ship. Sailing's main function is to move the ship.
• Adventuring: How good this crew is at exploration and adventuring. This skill is mostly used to complete Adventures
• Influnce: A measure of a crew's wealth, charisma and diplomatic skills. Influence is required to hire more crew and as a result it is most important in the first turns
• Swashbuckling: This measures two things. A) The ability of the crew to repair the ship, in effect providing "damage soak" and B) How effective the crew is at melee. This translates as damage (hits) inflicted from a succesfull boarding attack.

Crew also had various frequent traits that allowed them to use certain cards. The most usual traits are:

• Swordsman: The crew's skill in melee measured with a number (+1, +3 etc). It translates as extra damage in boardings and it allowed the crew to attach swordsman school attachment cards. All captains had some level of Swordsmanhip.
• Heroic/Villainous: These mutually exclusive traits revealed a crew's "way of life". There were various cards that were allowed (or not allowed) on one of these two traits. For most of the history of the game, Villainous was considered a better trait to have on your Captain, since it gave access to easy card draw.
• Sorcery: There were various types of sorcery in the world of Theah, and various crew could use them as attachments. However those attachments had a specific sorcery requirement of a certain level (0-2) that the crew had to have to attach them.

Each ship had a limited amount of space for crew and that meant that smaller ships usually had lower resource and offensive capabilities. Usually this was balanced out with different benefits, like stronger abilities and lower sailing costs. Players usually chose crew for their deck depending on their style and their faction's strengths usually focusing on one or two stats and maybe a trait (like sorcery). Crew with sailing or swashbuckling were always useful due to their innate use on movement and damage soak, however players not always focused on more than one or two of the other three skills, Cannon, Adventuring and Influence so as to be able to use specific cards more easily. Decks which focused on many skills together where the most difficult to build, but a good player then had a much greater versatility.

Crew cards' boarding attack was a Punch.

Actions

Action cards are the surprises you can spring on an unsuspecting opponent. They are fire and forget cards that have some immediate effect. In 7th Sea, action cards had two costs. One was for the player and the other for his target (the cancelling cost) and it was in the form of Skill: number. Costs are paid by tacking one or more crew with the appropriate skill, until the number is fulfilled. The cancelling cost was there for the target of the action and it allowed him to, obviously, cancel the action by paying it. Thus some pretty powerful cards could be balanced by having a lower cancelling cost. Cost and cancel need not use the same skill.

Action cards came in two types, Acts and Reacts. Acts are cards a player used in his turn. They usually worked to provide some unexpected effect, such as a combined cannon attack or a unstoppable boarding. Reacts are the much more common form of action cards. They can only be played on specific triggers such as an augment to a cannon attack, suffering hits or instead of a boarding attack.

All decks employed action cards, and usually the more aggresive decks employed a greated number.

Action cards' boarding attack could either be a Dagger or a Slash.

Attachments

Attachment cards are default enhancing cards for your other cards (the other being adventures). After the player pays the cost, he chooses an appropriate card to attach it to. Usual target for attachents were:

• Crew: Attachments ranged from pistols and earrings to parrots and spells.
• Ship: Ship attachments usually modified the ship in some way, such as a treasure hold, better sails, figureheads (usually specific to factions) etc. Some ship attachments had the drawback that they took crew space.
• Sea: Sea attachments usually were ports, monsters and allies you could employ. These oftenly required a specific sea.

Usually attachment had some kind of trait that classified it such as Item, Henchman, Pet, Swordman School, etc. For example, a pistol would be an Item while Rum Runners would be an ally. These traits were used to specify targets for other cards.

In later sets requirements for attachments became more frequent, those requirements ranged from a skill level (Cannon 4) to the alliance to a faction (eg Crimson Rogers) to the existence of a trait (Villainous) or a trait at a specific level (eg. Porte 2). Due to the speed of attachments, they usually had a much lower reward/cost ratio than adventures.

Attachment cards's boarding attack was a Club

Adventures

These are the second type of card a crew could attach. Adventures are the usual stuff of Hollywood; ancient relics, captured damsels, sea monsters, etc. These cards were almost exclusively completed with by the use of the adventuring skill and were defined by the following:

• Seas away: Adventures did not automatically attach to a crew, but rather they to a sea. When played, an adventure was placed a number of seas away from your ship (usually 1 to 3). Since to complete an adventure, you ship had to be on the same sea it served as a balance factor for the more powerful or cheap adventures by forcing you to sail to the target sea to get it (something not always easy when opponents where waiting in the middle)
• Native sea: Most adventures had one specific sea in which it was much easier to complete them. This could range from a single point of adventuring lower for low end adventures, to several points lower for the more costly ones. Then other adventures were easier to attach to specific crew, such a villainous, skeletal or Rose and Cross
• Reward: Adventure rewards usually increased a skill by a number of points with a high reward/cost ratio. However in later expansions, adventures started giving variable effects, such as traits or special abilties.

Although adventures were attached to a sea, they were only available to the player that attached them (barring other card effects), this was a nice way to "archive" uncompleted adventures without cluttering your hand. However various cards punished rampart adventure archiving.

Adventure Cards's boarding attach was a Thrust

Chanteys

Chanteys were introduced later in the life of the game. They signified various global changes in the world of Theah in the form of popular songs used by the populace. Chanteys were similar to actions. However their effects, contrary to action cards, were resident. They could affect only the player, an opponent or all players. Chanteys worked in a way similar to battlegrounds in L5R or Omens in Legend of the burning sands . That is, only one Chantey could be in effect at any one time. At any time a chantey came into play, the former chantey was discarded. More powerful chanteys had, except from a cancel cost, a discard cost that any player could use to get rid of the chantey.

Ships

These cards are special in that they are not in the deck but rather start in play, like your captain. Most ships belonged to a specific faction and could only be used by matching captains. Each ship was defined by the its faction, crew maximum and sailing cost.

Crew maximum was used to determine the max amount of crew you could have on your ship. Ships with big crew maximum tended to be more powerful in the late game, but more vunerable at the start.

Sailing cost shows how easy a ship is to maneuver. Some cards didn't use a fixed sailing cost but rather a ship's sailing cost (sometimes modified up or down). Small ship's strength was the fact that they filled fast and pressed the offensive quickly.

Seas

The five Sea were always the same. They came with each starter box and were placed in a specific order. Seas had no specific abilities other than forming a pseudo playing-board for ships to move and for being the target of cards. Each captain has a specific starting sea which usually had some kind of storyline tie. New players often wondered where were the other 2 seas which are not repressented with cards. The answer lies in the setting. The 6th sea is protected by a wall of flame and thus difficult to access, and the 7th sea is a mythical place and very hard to find.

Deck construction

Players make many choice when designing a deck. They must take in mind both the captain's and ship's abilties, the faction's strengths and weaknesses, and the direction they want to take the deck. Even with the same Captain and Ship, it is possible to make completely different deck types.

Restrictions

• A player must first choose a captain. The captain determines the faction
• A player must choose a ship of the same faction as the captain, or unaligned.
• The deck may not be less than 50 cards including captain and ship.
• A deck may not have more than 3 copies of a single card.

Strategies

There are many different concepts for a deck and many different ways to achieve them. Depending mainly on the faction and secondary on the ship. For example, the Castillians were mainly a boarding faction (which means they liked to attack in melee) but with the right construction it was possible to attack without boarding (by making ramming attacks and limited cannon). The original Castillian ship was a hulking galley but in later expansions they got a small fast ship that allowed them to perform a tactic called speed boarding Some sample deck foci are:

• Atomic Cannon: These decks focused on sinking the opponent's ship with one big cannon attack. They usually had many adventures and boarding evading actions
• Plinging: These decks focused on producing many small attacks, slowly forcing the opponent to tack-out. This was mainly achieved with cannon but there were variations with spells.
• Boarding: These decks focused on catching the opponent and entering boarding. They usually used big ships with lots of crew and had a nice spread of cards
• Speed Boarding: These decks focused on catching the opponent in a boarding during the first or early second turn. If they couldn't, they usually lost. The ships these decks used were small and with small sailing requirements.
• Control: These rare decks tried to complete the secondary control victory condition. They were the harder decks to construct competively.

Even these concepts had many ways to be carried out. For example, a boarding deck could be using only the captain to deal humongous damage while the rest of the crew absorbed (similar to atomic cannon no?) or small attacks with pistols and weak characters (much like plinging) or just have a nice spread. They could use boarding action cards to enhance the attacks or to just absorb damage. They could use attachments to win the attacks more easily, or adventures to dish out more pain etc.

Mixings of various strategies where not uncommon as well, such as a boarding deck that used a big cannon attack before the boarding to soften the enemy.

Gameplay

Game Start

At the start of each game, players used their captains starting wealth to recruit their starting crew. Since the starting crew could be anyone from the deck, it was a nice tactic to have some backup crew in the deck for specific situations (much like a sideboard, only built-in). Captain's starting wealth usually went from 7 to 10. Players usually went for influence producing crew in their starters though speed decks preffered sailing and offense.

Phases of the Game

Each turn has 3 phases. The first phase is used to determine which player goes first; the second phase, the most important one, is where the game is actually played and the final phase is the end of turn were all resources are replenished (by untacking and drawing cards).

In the main phase, starting with the first player, each player performs an act or passes and then play proceeded clockwise to the next player. Acts can be anything from a action card from the hand, to a printed act on a card in play to an innate act of the game like hiring crew or performing an cannon attack. Once all players pass consequetively, the turn ends.

The innate acts all players could perform in 7th sea are:

• Moving: By producing sailing equal or more than the ship's sailing cost, a player can move his ship to an adjacent sea.
• Cannon Attack: By producing any amount of cannon with a single crew, a player can inflict a same number of hits on a ship in the same sea.
• Hire Crew: If the ship has not reached its crew maximum, a player can reveal a crew from his hand and then produce equal or more influence than that crew to recruit it.
• Begin a boarding: By producing sailing equal to the ship's sailing cost, a player can attempt to begin a boarding against a ship in the same sea.
• Complete an adventure: While in the same sea as one of his own adventures, a player can play all costs and attach the adventure to an appropriate target.

Boardings

Boardings where the most interesting phase of the game. Once a player began a boarding that the other player could not cancel, the ships were locked together while the crew on top engaged in a cinematic melee battle. However while a player could escape a ship's cannons by running away, disengaging from boarding was not allowed without both player's concent or a card effect. This way boarding decks were rewarded for the difficulty they had to enter a boarding in the first place.

Boarding was a phase within the main phase. While in a boarding, the game stopped and players could no longer play acts. Boarding was only ever between two players who, starting with the attacker, began alternating boarding attacks. A Boarding attack was performed by choosing a crew and sending it forward to attack (in effect, jumping to the other ship and causing some trouble). Now this is where the fun began. The defender could either stand and take the hits (equal to the other crew's damage plus swordman level) or send someone forward to defend. All cards in the deck had 3 boarding boxes, the first and larger being the attack box and the two below it the defend boxes. The boarding boxes could be either [C] (Club), [P] (Punch), [D] (Dagger), [S] (Slash), or [T] (Thrust). The attacker starts by playing a card from his hand to initiate his attack; if the defender want to resist, his player must play a card from his hand that can defend against that type of attack (this means that the card played in response must have a defend box equal to the attack played). Now since all cards have always an attack box, the defenders immediately counters with that type and now the original attacker must defend himself. In effect this looks like a continuous cinematic "Thrust-Slash-Parry-Riposte" melee. This of course comes to an end when when one player cannot reverse the attack (either because his hand is empty, because he chose the order of his attacks wrongly or because he had a bad boarding hand) The player that played the last card wins and the loser must suffer the consequences (read hits). This is interesting in two ways; 1. You could end up inflicting hits as a defender and 2. The crew that were locked in melee must suffer the hits first, this is of course dangerous because you could end up losing your captain (and the game) while still in prime condition.

A player could also choose to pass instead of performing a boarding attack or play a react that is played instead of a boarding attack (examples include firing a musket or getting drunk). When both players performed a boarding attack, they drew 3 cards each and the attacks continued.

Since boarding boxes where spread in different card types, this usually meant that boarding decks had a nice spread of card types while cannon or victory decks were chock full of two or three card types. That meant that if a dedicated cannon deck was caught in a boarding, all it could do was suck it up.

Death and Destruction

Ships are fragile things. When a ship suffered hits, the crew were responsible to fix it by tacking or sinking (that means killed). Hits cannot be ignored. When a captain sinks to absorb hits you lose the game. Players sometimes employed action cards to help them absorb hits.

Victory

In 7th sea, there were two roads to victory. You could either sink all enemy ships, or perform a control victory (which meant you had to play some pretty expensive cards, one in each sea).

Storyline

7th Sea was a heavily story influenced game. Its factions had ties to specific RPG elements and rivalries and alliances occurred between them as the story progressed. The first story arc saw many serious conflicts, not necessarily all tied together. Storyline death were not uncommon (they didn't have some specific effect in the game) and the game even saw the death of an entire faction.

Factions

• Crimson Rogers: These were pure bloodthirsty pirates. Their captain, Reis, was the most villainous captain alive and their red sails were feared slightly less than the Black Freighter. The Crimon Rogers moto was No Banter, No Barter, No Quarter. Crimson Rogers had excellent cannon, adequate boarding and adventuring capabilities and had low influence. They were mostly Villainous
• Sea Dogs: More like privateers than pirates and they were sponsored by the Avalon. (A Great Britain-like faction) At some point in the storyline they pissed off the Crimson Rogers which led to the destruction of their ship and the near-death of their first captain Berek, the luckiest man alive. Bloody Bonnie McGee took the helm and sacrificed her life for a chance to take down Reis. The Sea Dogs had high influence and had mainly jack of all trades crew. They dabbled in the Glamour sorcery and were primarily Heroic
• Castillians:Originally enemies of the Montaigne, they later allied with them to save their captain, Orduno. They were allied with the Castille nation (Based on Spain) and the Inquisition. Castillians were mainly a boarding faction with some cannon capabilities
• Montaigne: The Montaigne (Rennaisance French) were the wealthiest faction around and as a result they could excel at many things. They usually employed Musketeers for swordfights and their fighting style was the trickiest of all. Their original captain, the General, was a mercenary soldier that got promoted as a pirate hunter. Their secondary captain, was mainly preoccupied in bringing the Montaigne rivals, the Castillians, back in line. Montaigne had many good swordmen and fighting tricks while also being very fast on the offensive due to their high influence
• The Brotherhood: : As cliché as a pirate can get, the Brotherhood were a bunch of convicts that escaped from a castillian prison and went privateer. Their orgininal captain, Allende was captured at some point in the story arc, only to be freed by Berek from the Sea Dogs after he became the Brotherhood's new captain. The Brotherhood had high adventuring and as a result they could use it to do many different things by completing adventures, however they were slow due to this and as a result they were very weak in the start. Later ships and captains with powerful abilities granted them playability
• The Explorers: The explorers were neither pirates nor allied with any faction (excepting secret societies). Their captain, Guy McCormic was obsessed with finding ancient Syrneth (old extinct high-tech civilization) artifacts. At some point, after he sacrificed a crew member in his passion, the rest of the crew mutineed and overcame him. Explorers had very high adventuring and sailing and were very good at escaping trouble
• The Corsairs: The only Crescenters (Based on the real Otomanic empire) in 7th sea were the Corsairs. Their captain, Kheired Din was a ruthless slavemaster that sacrificed his own crew to get results, oh and he was immortal as well. The corsairs were hit hard, storywise, when their slaves rebelled and their leader, Espero, turned out to be a descendent of the lost Castillian royal bloodline. The second corsair ship was led by Ernesto Castillus (AKA Espero) who's actions were critical to the end of the storyline. Corsairs were very good at boardings, and had a very high damage absorption
• The Gosse's Gentlemen: A former legend once again picks up the sword and sails the seven seas along with his band of heroic gentlemen-pirates. Gosse had sworn to bring down the Black Freighter captained by the man who killed his wife. He managed it in the end, with the help of Ernesto Castillus and the sacrifice of his ship and life. The Gosse had very high swashbuckling and as a result they were very good at boardings and to some extent, damage absorption
• The Vesten: The Vesten were based on the Vikings of old time. Bitter over the betrayal of their greedy kinsmen, these pirates ruthlessly hunted and looted any Vesten Trading ship they caught. At some point, they were betrayed from within but their captain Yngvild survived and hunted for revenge. The next captain was led by their betrayer and rival Jorund. The Vesten were possibly the only faction that could only do boardings. Their cannon abilities were non-existent but they filled it with large amounts of damage-absorption
• The Black Freighter: The Undead of 7th Sea sailed on a Huge Ghost ship. Their original Captain, Necros was brought back to avenge his death at the hands of Gosse. Their original crew consisted on a number of undead crew from each other faction while the rest of their crew were mainly undead versions of normal crew (since they couldn't recruit non black freighter crew). The first story arc ended with the death of Necros and his ship. The Black Freighter was an interesting faction since it relied on skeletal crew and fear cards. They could go for either boarding or cannon and usually mixed both.

There were also a number of "unaligned" crew who belonged to no faction and so were usable by any Captain. Usually these were generic pirates, but some were given quite a bit of character, and even included a handful of captains.

The Story Arc

The first story arc began with minor events and conflicts between the various factions and gradually progressed with events of greater importance which ended up changing the state of the world. Notable events were the rivalry between the Sea Dogs and the Crimson Rogers which climaxed with the apparent death of Captain Reis at the hands of the Sea Dogs second captain; Bloody Bonnie McGee, the appearance of the Black Freighter and its later defeat in the hands of Phillip Gosse by the sacrifice of his whole faction. And finally the Corsair's search for the final Syrneth switch which revealed the hidden island, Cabora, and their destiny.

The second story arc didn't have enough time to be fully fleshed out but it started with the Montaigne Revolution and the capture of their former emperor.

Experience

As with most other AEG games, experience was a major factor in the game's progression. Experienced crew usually got stronger and costlier. Since 7th sea had a lax uniqueness rule, usually experienced crew ended up becoming unique. Experienced crew sometimes ended up changing factions (Such as the experienced versions of killed crew becoming Black Freighter members) or gained some secret society allegiance.

• Note that experienced crew could simply be hired, unlike evolved Pokemon for example.

History

In the time 7th Sea was alive, both the RPG and the CCG had a very loyal following. Players would oftenly ask for a specific result in a storyline tournament while offering bounty to enyone who achieved it. The game may be cancelled, but a following of the game still exists with tournaments in major events and custom cards.

Expansions

The first base set of 7th Sea offered 6 factions for player to choose from while later expansions revealed more factions. The game saw two more base sets and a final online only set at its closing.

• No Quarter (The original base set. It had the Crimson Rogers, Explorers, Sea Dogs, Brotherhood, Montaigne and Castillian factions.)
• Strange Vistas (The first expansion revealed the Corsairs and the Gosse's Gentlemen.)
• Broadsides (a revision of the base set, which also contained new specific faction-only cards.)
• Shifting Tides (This set revealed the Vesten as a new faction)
• Scarlet Seas
• Black Sails (This set's interesting fact, other than it revealed the black freighter, was that it didn't have normal boosters but rather uber-boosters that gave one of each card in the set)
• Fate's Debt
• Horizon's Edge
• Reaper's Fee (Probably the hardest set to currently locate, included a new Castillian captain and a Vendel Captain)
• Iron Shadow (The second revision of the base set was arguably the biggest release of the game since it contained all the ships and captains while also having new versions of older cards to make them more playable and a new card layout)
• Syrneth Secret
• Parting Shot (The Final set of 7th sea was released only in an online form and mainly to close the storyline and balance the factions. A Final gift from AEG to its loyal customers)

In 2000, No Quarter won the Origins Awards for Best Trading Card Game of 1999 and Best Graphic Presentation of a Card Game or Supplement of 1999, and Strange Vistas won Best Card Game Expansion or Supplement of 1999.

Ghost Ship:The Death of a Game

Although 7th sea seemed to be going very good sales-wise, there were some things that started spelling the end of the game. First, the third release of the base set saw the reprint of many older cards with new abilities to increase their playability. While many players saw this as a good move ( because it effectively increased their card base), others had a hard time keeping track of the changes while others didn't want to waste money on new versions of cards they already had.

Then, after a series of storyline tournament in which the players themselves would mark a faction for death, The Gosse Faction was destroyed. This meant that no more crew and Gosse specific cards would appear in the game. For many loyal Gosse players, this was intolerable and they quit the game in disgust, sometimes taking their group with them.

Finally, a marketing error mentioned a set as The final set of 7th Sea. While this was a storyline trick, based on the end of the first story arc, some players took it as a discontinuation of the game by AEG and started something else while ignoring this last set. As a result sales in that and following sets were at an all time low, finally prompting AEG to pull the plug.

The Present

7th Sea, like other great games like Doomtown or Rage remains in the mind of the players as a fond memory. The games were always enjoyable and player could easily envision the great swordfights and grandiose battles they played out. Many players don't want this feeling to die and thus they continue to play in tournaments and even design their own cards and even whole sets.

Luckily since the RPG is still alive, there is still interest in the setting and sites like the Adventures Compedium continue to support the CCG as well as the RPG.

The game is also in the process of porting into CCG workshop so as to have an online place to play with real artwork.

External Links

• Official Swashbuckling Adventures Site
• Swashbuckling Adventures Compendium
• Play 7th Sea online on CCG Workshop