Steamboat Simulator 1851 (A Prototype)

It is the Gregorian Calendar Year 1851. The nascent empire of the United States of America creeps westward from the Potomac across the great back of Turtle Island. Along the way, it encounters ancient and powerful rivers, and grants them bastard names on distant parchment: the winding Ohio, the muddy Missouri, the lazy Arkansas, the ruddy Red, and the mighty Mississippi.

In the west, wars of expansion continue against the native inhabitants of Turtle Island, with all colors and sorts of settlers lured by the promise of land and California gold. In the east, President Millard Fillmore has made chattel slavery the law of the land by affixing his signature to the Fugitive Slave Act. Vigilantes stalk the land armed with hounds and their fears of a world where all human beings are not only created equal but treated like it too.

Upon this chaotic and sublime stage a growing cast of settlers, snake-oil salesmen, and fugitives from slavery ride the rivers upstream and down. They flee those ills to which they cannot look back, and seek such promises as they dream fulfilled.

You are the captain of a steamboat, eking out what living you may in this vast watershed of time and space. Purchase your cargo, hire your crew, and pray the weather holds…

Howdy! The .ZIP archive you can download here is the unfinished guide to Steamboat Simulator 1851, as well as a couple spreadsheets I used for playtesting and prototyping the game. I worked on the it from late autumn 2019 to early summer 2020. During that time, I was mostly concerned with fleshing out the core simulation and gameplay loop on paper with an eye towards eventually convincing someone with greater coding capabilities than mine to help me make a rough digital prototype. However the arrival of a new global plague, a series of uprisings against imperial governance, and the mind-melting and disillusioning demands of remote work thoroughly sank my ambitions to put any more work into this game. I don’t necessarily want to be the one to bring this shipwreck out of the mud (at least not at the time of writing), but I’m happy to point potential salvagers to its place in the river of collective imagination.

Following the rules as written, this game makes for a super clunky – but technically playable – tabletop experience. I would encourage those who pick up this prototype to consider experimenting with adding the following:

• MORE PERSONALITY STATS FOR CREW MEMBERS – ETHNICITY, AGE, ADDICTION, RELIGION, POLITICAL-AFFILIATION & BIGOTRY MECHANICS: As it stands, the Crew are basically different flavors of robots that do what you tell them to do until they hate you and mutiny (or not!). One of the next steps I planned on taking was fleshing out the Crew by making them more like the real, fallible people who lived and worked through the antebellum period in the Mississippi watershed. They would have different ethnic backgrounds and religious beliefs that inform their political affiliations and potential bigotries, all of which would affect their Morale in different circumstances. This was a time when an overwhelming majority of people didn’t consider Irish, Italian, or Jewish people “White,” and Catholics and Protestants could be easily brought to each others’ throats if the mood was wrong. I'd probably also adjust the rates at which they burn out so that something more akin the gruff camaraderie I imagine existed on steamboats of the time is apparent in the played dynamics of the game. Maybe there's interesting ways to give the Captain stats independent of the player's personal sentiments...
• RANDOM MORAL ENCOUNTERS & THEIR MECHANICAL FALLOUT: The real grain of imaginative sand that this game crystallized around was a moral choice that I wanted to compel players to make – will they help fugitives from slavery escape upstream? Players could simply refuse, which would make racist Crew gain a Morale boost at the same time that it would make abolitionist Crew lose Morale. On the other hand, taking Black fugitives aboard would make abolitionist Crew gain Morale and Efficiency (because now there are lives and freedom on the line) while making bigoted Crew variably upset. If players agreed to play a part in the Underground Railroad, then they would have a chance to encounter vigilantes, cops, or federal officers boarding their boat and attempting to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Players could choose to fight, lie, or turn over the fugitives, with attendant mechanical fallout in terms of injury to the boat, Crew, and their Morale. This sort of set of morally-fraught encounters around the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act on folks fleeing chattel slavery was the reason I set the game in 1851. Millard Fillmore doesn’t get a bad enough rap nowadays as a POTUS, not that the game is about him. Part of the point of Steamboat Sim 1851 is that there's a degree to which it matters what people get up to on the Potomac. The sky is wide, and the President is far away.
• PASSENGERS & BIG BOATS: The prototype game is designed with a small steamboat in mind; one built more for a small crew and good bit of cargo. However, I think it would be a fun apex mechanical challenge to make the player the Captain of a large, quintessential, iconic passenger steamboat like the Sultana (hell, why not run a Sultana campaign? "Can you avoid disaster?"). I imagine Passengers as having a collective Morale tracked independently of the Crew's Morale. It'd probably be based on some measure of how smooth and fast the ride is. They'd have no Efficiency stat. They'd be more likely to just abandon ship rather than have a mutiny when their Morale drops low enough, though their participation in a total mutiny isn't out of the question on a bad enough voyage. I think they'd mostly be drunk and getting in the way of the crew. Wouldn't it be fun to have to deal with there being a casino on your boat? What about if bandits attack?
• ACCUMULATING DEBT & EXPLOITATIVE CONTRACTS: The core of the game as it stands – the main thing that this prototype actually simulates – is the transport and delivery of goods. I haven’t studied the economics of antebellum river shipping, but at least for the ludonarrative purposes of the game I think having debts owed to different banks and bankers along the river would make for an effective way to put further pressure on players across the span of multiple delivery “missions,” and even allow for curious financial games for the fiscally cunning. I encourage potential players to experiment with a more robust financial system for the game, though one based as much as possible on what was actually extant in the Mississippi River watershed in 1851.
• SETTLEMENTS & WHAT TO DO THERE: It's obvious that there were settlements along the rivers, and that steamboats would sometimes stop there for a variety of reasons, fuel being just the most pertinent to continued travel. Settlements along the rivers may afford mutinous and disaffected crew members a random chance to abandon ship, at which point the player could go to an inn or other drinkery and search for new hires. Players could stock up on petty supplies they were unable to forage from the river, or trade and sell any excesses of product they may have. Players could even sell their entire cargo to someone else if they wanted to deal with the financial fallout from their creditors, or try to play games with debt and other gambles at the financial institutions and tables of the town. My greatest hope is that anyone who wants to run with what there is of this game will go buckwild with the towns and random encounters that may happen there as well. Let there be brawls, prostitutes, orphan children, packs of dogs, livestock, mud, theatre troupes, traveling preachers, house fires, bandit attacks, bank robberies, duels, and all such manner of human texture.
• ACTUALLY BALANCING THE GAME'S SYSTEMS: All the bone rolls and arrangements here are basically in a first-pass state. The game is probably too unforgiving in a lot of places, and may be randomly too easy in others. Tweak it however you need to so that it's fun and challenging.

That’s all there really is to say at this point. I would highly encourage potential players to rope a few friends in on the experience to take on roles as crew members and help track all the nitty gritty mechanics and systems-changes that happen every single turn. Games are more fun with other people!

Thanks for playing!