Belisarius Limited
A career at sea in the Golden Age, 1715–1739.
You are sixteen, you are a Sarnian, and there is a ship in the roads. Twenty-five years pass one month at a time. Most men do not see the end of them.
The game
The Sarnian Isles is a turn-based visual novel about a naval career in the Caribbean of the 1710s and 1720s — an archipelago that is the Channel Islands transplanted, with its own Bailiff, its own twelve Jurats, and a Royal Court that condemns prizes on a Tuesday.
You answer six questions about your childhood and you are entered on a ship’s books. After that the game asks you one thing a month for twenty-five years: what do you do about this. There is no branching tree and no correct route. What happens next is drawn from everything you are — your rank, your station, the season, the year, your debts, your reputation, and the two hundred things the game has written down about you.
There is no going back. Rollback is switched off. A man who drowns in January 1719 drowned in January 1719, and the game will tell you what he was remembered for and then close the book on him.
Measured over 500 careers
Not a difficulty setting. This is what actually happens, counted by playing the game through five hundred times.
Median age at the end: twenty-seven.
Four ways up, and the price of each
A King’s officer, from midshipman to the examination to post rank and, for a very few, a flag. The most sea time, the best money, and the sea itself for an enemy.
82% die · 39% are made post
Aboard forward, with the people. Nobody writes a letter for you. You are likelier to live than any other man in the game and likelier to be ruined by the end of it.
67% die · 24% reach boatswain
A letter of marque from the Lieutenant Governor, licensing you against an enemy the peace of 1714 has abolished. Rich, respectable, and one press gang from the lower deck.
72% die · 40% reach commander
No letter, no King, articles of your own and an equal share of everything except the rope. Your rank is voted and can be voted away again.
91% die · 28% are elected captain
On their real dates
The islands are invented. Almost nothing else is. The dated content runs 1715 to 1726, and the years after it are your career playing out past the end of the period that made it possible.
The plate fleet goes ashore in a hurricane off Florida, and every seaman in the Caribbean hears about it inside a month.
Woodes Rogers arrives at Nassau with the King’s pardon in one hand. In November, Ocracoke.
Cape Lopez, and the end of the most successful pirate any of them ever produced.
The South Sea Company’s Greenland whale fishery — English ships, Dutch harpooners, and a Danish guardship that claims the whole sea.
The Asiento: the contract this entire economy is paid for, and the hold your ship is escorting.
The First Maroon War in Jamaica. There is no choice in the game that defeats them, because there was none.
The Bailiwick
Sarnia, Sercq, Herme, Lihou and the reefs between them: settled by Norman exiles, held by the British Crown, governed by a Lieutenant Governor who issues letters of marque to anyone who can find a man to speak for him.
The Seigneur of Sercq does as he pleases. The Royal Court sits on prizes. Every man and woman in the islands is a mariner by default, and half the seamen in the West Indies have been paid off from a war that ended in 1714 and are looking for something to do.
A good many of them have concluded that the difference between a privateer and a pirate is a piece of paper.
The developer
Belisarius Limited makes historical games for people who would rather be told the truth about a period than flattered by it.
The Sarnian Isles is built on the principle that a game about the eighteenth century should be willing to be as dangerous, as unfair and as administratively tedious as the eighteenth century was. Nothing in it is tuned by intuition: every number on this page was arrived at by playing the game several hundred times and counting what happened.
