Catch Command '98Catch Command '98

January 15, 1998. Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

The Bering Sea snow crab season opens today. Two hundred and twenty-nine boats are going out after a quarter of a billion pounds of opilio, and nobody knows how long it will stay open: a few weeks, maybe two months, until Fish and Game reckons the fleet has taken its guideline and faxes the closing. Every pound you land before then counts. After it, every pot still in the water is a pot you have to go and get.

You own a small company: three boats, a mortgage on them, and $400,000 in the bank. Eight rival companies are out there with forty boats between them. The race runs season after season, from 1998, through the 2000 crash, to 2005 when it ended and the fishery went to quota.

How it plays

• You're a skipper. Draw a string of pots on the water and she lays it. Choose how long it soaks, haul it pot by pot, and decide which pots go back over and which come aboard, with one eye on the sounder and one on the radar. If you prefer, hand the boat over to your mate and focus on the business decisions. Or skipper AND run the business, it's your choice.

• Your skippers run the rest. Send one to a block you think is fishing, tell him where to sell and how hard to drive his  crew, and he works it his own way.

• Sell, then go back out. Deliver at Dutch Harbor or St. Paul. Watch the books to see how finances are faring.

• Fish to the closing. When Fish and Game announces it, every boat races to get her gear soaked and hauled in time.

• Stop or speed up the clock. From real time to 5000 times faster, and the game time stops when something needs you. Want to defer minor decisions to the office and only focus on urgent matters? You can do that.

Know Your Skippers

Each skipper has a nature of his own: bold or careful, greedy, loyal, proud, iron, sharp, or a drinker. Each thinks something of you, and it shows in their work. A skipper who is devoted to you works his gear faster and takes your orders without complaint. One who has soured drags his feet, soaks his gear longer than you asked, refuses orders, asks for a bigger share, and in the end could walk off the boat. You can fire one and hire another, or take on a rival's man who wants a berth.

The Bering Sea in winter

The pack ice comes down over the grounds each winter as it did historically, and closes the ports under it. In a gale the spray freezes on the rails and the stacked pots faster than the crew can break it off, and a boat carrying too much weight high goes tender, lists, and can go over. Cut the stack loose and lose the pots, or hold on and bring her through. Storms come in on the forecast, squalls show on the radar, hands get hurt, engines fail and the pot block's hydraulics give out.

Rivals fleets

It is 1998: there is no satellite tracking, and nobody posts their catch. You see a rival boat when she is on your radar, hear her deliveries at the dock a day late, and hear her skipper on the radio naming a block and a catch, which may even be true. Stand by one of their boats in trouble, or tow her in, and her company remembers; set your gear across one of their strings and they remember that, too. A friendly company's skippers give your gear room. A hostile one's crowd it. Between seasons the rivals buy boats, sell them, and sometimes go under.

Historically Accurate Campaign

The campaign's seasons are based on historical data. The crab are laid on the bottom from NOAA's summer trawl surveys and, where the Alaska Department of Fish and Game recorded it, the fleet's catch block by block. The guideline, the size of the fleet, the prices, the ice and the closing dates come from Fish and Game's reports. In 1999 the catcher boats sit in port three days over the price. 2000 is the crash: the guideline cut by over 85%, the opening held until April by the ice, and eight days to fish. By 2005 the derby is six days long, and then it's over: what your company caught over the seasons becomes its share of the quota.

What's in it

• The 1998 campaign. Eight seasons of the Bering Sea snow crab derby, 1998 to 2005, each on its own year's survey, guideline, prices, ice and closing.

• Generated campaigns. A made-up sea, its survey, its crab and its weather drawn from a seed, season after season for as long as the company lasts. Or a single generated season if you prefer.

• A company to grow. Borrow from the bank, buy used boats off the market and pots for the dock, sell a boat when you must. Three kinds of boat: a 110 ft crabber, a 125 ft converted supply boat and an 88 ft schooner.

• A bank that calls the debt. Let the loan run past what your boats are worth and it sends a letter. Leave it past the gear deadline and it sells your boats for you.

• Forty rival boats of eight companies that fish the same crab off the same bottom, deliver, talk on the radio, and remember what you did for them and against them.

• Crab that move. They wander, migrate down the slope through the winter, and are fished down pot by pot, by you and by everyone else.

• 600+ events. Fish and Game coming aboard, a boat that corks you, a rival in trouble, a skipper's family, the closing read out on the radio. Every choice changes something real.

• A working boat. A 3D chart of the whole Bering shelf down to each pot on its string, a weather radar, a color sounder, and a view of your boat working in the seas.

• Steam Cloud saves and 27 achievements.