Trade Winds

Trade Winds is a sea-chart trading game. The whole world is one painted chart: eight islands with harbour towns, lighthouses and windmills, dotted sailing routes between them, a compass rose in the corner and soundings inked across the open water. You drag the chart about with a finger, pinch to zoom, and tap an island to lay a course. Your ship crawls along the route in real seconds, leaving a white wake, while gulls wheel over the headlands and the odd whale rolls past.

The money is in the difference between harbours. Each island grows two goods cheaply and is short of two others, so spice bought at Marigold Quay is worth three times as much at Sugarloaf — until you land forty crates of it and the price falls through the floor. Prices drift on their own too, buying pushes them up, selling pushes them down and time pulls them back, so the market is never the same twice. The rumour board on every quay tells you where somebody heard a good price, second-hand and a little out of date, which is exactly how a rumour works. The harbour takes a cut both ways, so there is no clever trick that prints money; the only way up is a better route than the one you sailed last.

The sea has opinions. Painted cloud bands drift across the chart: a tailwind shoves you along, a squall slows you and can spoil a crate unless you have doubled the planking, and fog is where the pirates like to sit. When a sloop with a black sail cuts across your bow you can run for it and lose ground, pay the toll, or run out the guns if you have fitted any. Spend your profits on canvas, a deeper hold, a heavier hull, cannons, a warehouse to sit on a cargo until the price comes back, and a second and third ship to work their own routes. Twenty goals take you from your first sale to Trade Baron, and after that your net worth is the score.