Chess in the Lounge, and a Storm at Sea

Two things happened on the ship this week. One is a small game inside the big one, and one is the first part of the voyage's own story.

A real game of chess

The cabin deck lounge has always had a chess table with two passengers playing at it. They were an animation: two figures moving their hands over a board that was only scenery. Ask them for a seat now and the board fills the screen.

It is a full game of chess, not a puzzle dressed up as one. Castling, en passant, every promotion, check and mate, stalemate, threefold repetition and the fifty-move rule are all there, and you can claim a draw when you are owed one, or say in advance that your next move claims it. You play ivory, the lounge regular plays walnut, nothing is timed, and the moves you have played run down the side of the board.

The lounge chess board: a wooden board with ivory and walnut pieces on the ship's cabin deck, a knight selected with the squares it can reach marked, and a side panel reading Your move, Ivory, with the recent moves listed. — Your move, ivory. The opponent takes its time.

It is played with the mouse, or with a stick and a button: move the cursor, choose a piece, choose one of the highlighted squares. The move generator is checked against the standard test positions, so the rules it plays by are the real ones. It is new, and it is still settling in.

The night the weather turned

The other addition is bigger, and it is the first piece of the voyage having a plot at all. From the cruise journal you can carry on sailing. It gets dark, the rain comes in, and the ship is a long way from anywhere.

The ship side-on at night in heavy rain, its decks and cabin windows lit, on a dark rolling sea under layered cloud. — Later that night, a long way from port.

Out on the sports deck, two officers are trying to see through it and cannot. Then an island comes out of the dark, with a black rock in front of it, and there is not enough time to do anything about it.

The ship driving towards a small island in the dark: palms bent in the wind on the shore, and a jagged black rock jutting into the water ahead of the bow. — The island, and the rock ahead of the bow.

The hull grinds to a stop against it, and afterwards the five friends find each other in the lounge on Deck 9. Then you have control again, with the ship where it now is and everything you had done on board still done.

The five friends back together in the cabin deck lounge afterwards, with a line of dialogue asking whether everyone is okay. — Everyone accounted for, on the deck where the chess table is.

The ship, the island and its crew are new artwork; the rain, the lightning, the roll of the hull and the spray are drawn by the game as it runs. The rest of the ship is still there to walk around afterwards. What the island turns into is for later: there is no golf on it yet.

And two new pieces of music

The ship has its own theme now — an easy, bright sea-day track that plays across all six decks, the mini golf and the buffet — and the basement has an instrumental hip-hop groove of its own for practice nights. Both are written for the game, like everything else in its soundtrack.

Both of them, and the storm, are in the recut first-look trailer on the golf project page, along with the chess board.