You Must Build A Boat

Much of my free time over the past week or so has been taken up by the game "You Must Build A Boat," an addictive mix of side scroller and puzzle game. Your goal is to build a boat and recruit crew which is done by running through a dungeon defeating monsters (and then recruiting them for your crew), completing quests, and uncovering treasure.

You start out with a small skiff and two monsters already recruited. They help you get into the dungeon where you have to defeat the monsters, disable traps, and open treasure chests and crates that stand in your way. The way to victory, however, lies not in your ability to time your swings, spells, and counters, but rather in your ability to match tiles in sets of three or more and complete quests. Sometimes quests are about how long you can last in the dungeon but other times they have to do with mixing spells in a particular order or matching a certain number of a particular tile. Quests (among other things) can change the difficulty of the dungeon.

The challenges you face in the dungeon keep pushing you to the left of the screen until you are finally pushed off completely. The screen after exclaims "You win!" in large letters even when you feel utterly defeated. Then you find out if you completed any of the quests and, if so, gain your rewards. Quest rewards include recruiting monsters for your boat. Not only do they provide the manpower for moving the boat (which is done by jumping) but they give you benefits such as increasing the power of sword matches.

In addition to monsters, you also have experts on your boat to help you. They sell you upgrades to your equipment and/or provide valuable information about monster resistances and vulnerabilities. Items cost some combination of gold, dust, power, and thought. The last two are types of tiles you match in the dungeon.

One of the things I found in playing the game is that it often makes sense to just keep matching things even if there isn't a challenge currently in front of you or if the tiles are wrong for the challenge. This is also true between sections of the dungeon when a small title area appears and changes often are made to the dungeon's attributes.

The game isn't exactly relaxing given the timed nature of the matching but I find it fun and keep going back for more. It's available through Steam, iOS, and Google Play.