A Shot in the Dark

This game's concept started as a pen and paper, single-player 'Battleship' inspired game. And I quickly came up with the rules and gameplay and started refining it from there. Eventually I came up with an old pirate map looking image that explains the rules and gives advice on how to play the game. I tried to fit as much as I could on the papers without overcrowding it or over-explaining the game.

I felt the rules might need more clarification so here is an illustration showing how to play the game:

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions or feedback about this game! I only made this in about 3 days so I didn't get much time to refine the balance of it, which is why I encourage people to play with the design and craft it to their own liking, and let me know if you come up with a better structure! I'm very curious to see what people do with it.

One concept I thought about but didn't implement into the design, was "star" spaces, where if you landed on one, you would roll the die for a chance at 1 of 6 different effects. Some ideas were:

*The next roll you take will reveal both the longitude and latitude (top and left side) Coordinates of that space.

*Sail spaces are now worth 2 moves

*Treasure Chests now have a 1/2 chance of being opened (instead of 1/3)

So implement these or others you come up with if you want to. Put the star spaces wherever you like, I would have put them at 1 across 5 down, 2 across 6 down, and 5 across 2 down.

Clarification on rules:

The intention of this game design is that, when you roll, you first decide if you want to reveal the top coordinate or the left coordinate of the sector you're currently on, and THEN roll. So you're not deciding where you want the number you get to go, but instead 'revealing' the coordinate.

Also the marks on the 2nd page are meant to help you keep track of the game on your map as you play, but feel free to use whatever marks make sense to you.

This game was created by me, Paul Kia aka. puningtilde. There's a chance that there already exists a board game or pen and paper game like this out there, so if I accidentally made this too similar to one of those, the similarity is completely unintentional, the only game I've based this off of is Battleship (and the Wind Waker mini game)

All art was made by me. The fonts I used for this project are:

"Rock Salt" by Font Diner,

"Painting With Chocolate" by mooze

"Brafesuit" by Dhabee Studio

All of these are free for commercial use and can be found at 1001fonts.com

I created the pirate map manual for this game in Clip Studio Paint, and I included the original file as well as a .psd in the .zip download on this page for anyone who wants to poke around at it or make any changes. But all you need to play the game is the image.

This game is FREE and will always be free. I may make this into a paid video game at some point, but this pen and paper version is free for anyone to use, play, and iterate on. Please credit me (puningtilde) if you do distribute it in any form. And if you want to see more of the stuff I'm making, check out my Bluesky: @puning.bsky.social

I don't have a large online presence as of writing this, but I plan to have a website at some point as well, and probably more variety in social media presence.

Thank you! Please enjoy A Shot in the Dark!