You Must Build a Boat

Holy dang, I've been slackin' on updating this blog. It's not because I haven't been playing things. It's because I haven't been beating things. Overwatch has kind of been monopolizing my gameplay time. However, on a vacation flight to London recently, which afforded me many hours of downtime, I played "You Must Build a Boat" until it was squashed.

“You Must Build a Boat” is a puzzle/matching game. I played it on mobile (iOS), but I believe it is also available on Steam, though gameplay works really well on a mobile device.

You start out with the tiniest of boats and a sparse crew, and you must build a bigger boat to travel further into the depths of the river for reasons. You do this by completing quests during dungeon runs and collecting items and crew and resources to upgrade your abilities. This all sounds a little complicated, but it’s not. It’s a simple but fun game.

To begin a dungeon run, you go up to the top of your boat and talk to a dude. There’ll be an Add Quest button. You can add up to 3 quests in each dungeon run. They start out easy like “Use an item”, defeat some jackoff. The positive of rolling with three quests is that you can complete more quests in one run. Efficient! The downside being that adding more quests also adds more dangerous creatures to fight or harder chests and the like. But that doesn’t scare you, now does it?

During a run, the dungeon is shown at the top of the screen. Your little avatar will run from left to right, encountering beasties, chests, or traps. Below the dungeon view, is the meat of the game. There are tiles in rows and columns that you can slide to match like tiles. Matches must be horizontal or vertical. None of that diagonal bullshit. 3 tiles or more matched gets rid of the matched tiles and performs whatever action those tiles represent. So, if you are fighting a beastie, and you match 3 swords, the beastie will take damage. If you match 4 or 5 swords, it’ll take more damage. Chests require keys to be matched, beasties require swords or magic tiles to be matched. Traps can be disarmed by matching whatever icon they display. Shields give you a shield barrier. I told you this was simple.

It’s a fast paced game. The world is constantly moving forward Super Mario style, so if you take a while getting rid of an obstacle, you’ll get pushed off the edge, which means, try again loser. As you progress, you’ll get resources through these dungeon runs so that you can upgrade your weapon stats, magic stats, shield stats, etc, so you’re not such a pile of mush.

Once you complete all the quests of an area, you’re good to pull up anchor and move on to the next area, with a bigger, swankier boat, and a new crewman. New crewmen generally give you the option to upgrade or buy different things. New areas also mean new, more difficult baddies. Some have caveats like they are invulnerable to physical attack, for example, so you’ll have to focus on magic attack tile matches with them. You get the gist.

The quests get more difficult as time goes on as well. One of the final ones that gave me the most trouble was matching 356 tiles in a dungeon run. That took many a try. Most of the time though, you just put all three quests possible in there, and you complete things without actually specifically trying. You’re just playing the game. With the match a bajillion tiles one though, you throw strategy out the window and just match match match…and hope it’s enough, and then curse when it’s not. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is a great game to pass the time. I got surprisingly into it, and it made time fly by while I was on that long ass flight. (There might have been a pun in there, and I hate myself for it.) I think I spent almost 12 hours playing “You Must Build a Boat”, and for a mobile game, that’s pretty damn long and well worth the price of admission. Once you beat it, you can restart at a higher difficulty, but why? I have conquered you, game, so get out of my face. Thanks for the lols.