Becalmed

How to start

1. Open it in your AI. Tap Open in ChatGPT or Open in Claude, and press send, or paste the play prompt into any assistant that can open links. No account beyond the one you have.
2. The game loads. The card prints every dice roll for the fortnight (the tape) and starts you on the first morning in Boat Four, five souls aboard.
3. Read the fortnight, then make the day's calls. The whole tape is printed. Each dawn the AI announces the weather; you choose the water ration (full, short or dry), the canvas (sail, awning or down) and the crew's job for the day.
4. Make the beach. Thirty leagues west in fourteen days, or a ship in the shipping lane. Then rebuild the tape at aigamecards.com/verify and compare it with the rolls you were shown.

Questions

Does the AI decide the weather, or is it fixed?

Fixed, and printed on the card you paste. The fortnight comes off a d20 tape seeded becalmed:1.0.0 at two values a day — the first is that dawn's sky, the second that dusk's sea — so day n reads positions 2n−1 and 2n. The tape position in the ledger counts the values read: odd after a dawn sky, even after a dusk sea, and the next value read is always the one after it. Nothing else on the card ever reads the tape: no roll for a fish, no roll for a flare, no roll for a death. You can rebuild the whole sequence from the seed at aigamecards.com/verify and check every value you were dealt.

If the whole fortnight is printed, where is the game?

The game is the plan. You can see on the first morning that day two is the only squall in fourteen days, that three gales are coming, and that a ship crosses your band twice. Knowing it does not make one more measure of water. You have twenty-six measures, thirty leagues and one piece of canvas that is either speed or shade, and the arithmetic does not balance — so the question is which day you can afford to lose.

What is the actual decision each day?

The boat has one sail. Set as a sail it drives her west; spread as an awning it gives shade and catches rain, but the drogue goes out and she makes no way at all — not even the westward set she would drift on anyway. You also call the ration, full or short or dry, and thirst only ever comes down by drinking. A day under the awning buys water and costs the whole day's distance; a day under sail buys distance and costs water; and stowed down she makes only the set, which is the one way to ride out hard weather without losing the canvas and the only way to put a line over the side.

Can I actually lose, or does it end well if I muddle through?

You can lose it completely. Thirst runs 0 to 7; at 5 a named soul goes down, at 7 the man who has been down longest dies and another goes down with him, one a day, in an order printed on the card so the AI can never pick a victim for drama. Call the sail, the oars and a short ration every day on the published tape and every soul aboard is dead or dying by the eighth day, six leagues short of the beach. Hoard instead — dry rations, the oars every day, the awning only when it catches — and it ends the same way on the eighth day, with twenty-seven measures still in the breaker, more than she started with. Missing the beach by the fourteenth day is a loss too: the set swings north and carries you off the chart.

Is there any way out other than reaching land?

Ships cross the drift in one band, between fourteen and twenty-four leagues of westing, and you have two flares. A sail to windward wants one flare; a masthead light hull down wants both burnt together. There is no roll — she sees you or she does not, by arithmetic — so the only question is whether a certain rescue now is worth more than the beach later. Sprint past twenty-four leagues and you have traded the lane for the shore, which is a real decision and not always the right one.