This was precisely the issue we ran into with Balloon Cup. Long story short -- in about 1 in 500 games you can reach a "lock up" state (no legal move can be made). It never happened in any playtest or during development. But literally days within its release there were BGG posts of it happening. Yikes!
Fortunately there was an easy fix. But still terribly embarrassing.
Seems like there's still a lot of chances of failure. As SteveVB mentions, as the game progresses every voyage that is attempted with less than total repair starts to tend towards much more likely sunk-fleet scenarios.
If it were my design I would have a guess at what I thought were total sunk fleet odds I can live with, and than do the maths on how many damage is a person likely (just on average) to have prior to their 2nd,3rd,4th, etc, voyage.. and then show me the stats on the likelihood of exhausting the damage deck in each of those starting positions.
Now I'll know how often a person hits the limit in a game. I suspect it's significantly more often than 1 in 4500 (for a starting deck of 12). But maybe it's barely 1 in 4,000.
The point here, is that a deck of 15 might only make hte problem go from common to infrequent, when the designer wants the impact to be hardly ever.
P.S Point taken that you really only care about the first-turn death. But perhaps the others are just as important. Design for that.
Isn't this problem going to be worse than calculated? Drawing 10 damage card in the third turn after having 2 sail 1 damage turns still feels pretty brutal and the chances for that are way higher I guess.
What about giving all damage cards a number that indicate whether you add them or not, otherwise you add 1. So if you have a very high exploding roll you might still add 8 cards in one turn but (because those cards are numbered 1/2/3/4/5/7/9/12 or something and you rolled +13) so you add all of them. You can have the last damage card(s) simply have a block symbol which means no more than 1 is added at any time.
This then makes it so that very bad rolls are slightly less bad when you already have some damage, and that after a very bad roll you always guarantee some chance to finish the game but still make it very bad if you roll very high.
It also lets you tweak the amount of damage cards and the speed with which they are added relative to the die roll (decoupling)
This was precisely the issue we ran into with Balloon Cup. Long story short -- in about 1 in 500 games you can reach a "lock up" state (no legal move can be made). It never happened in any playtest or during development. But literally days within its release there were BGG posts of it happening. Yikes!
Fortunately there was an easy fix. But still terribly embarrassing.
I remember that! It's my biggest fear on release - sorry you had to live that!
Why don't you let the player choose to Turn Back after each roll of the dice?
Seems like there's still a lot of chances of failure. As SteveVB mentions, as the game progresses every voyage that is attempted with less than total repair starts to tend towards much more likely sunk-fleet scenarios.
If it were my design I would have a guess at what I thought were total sunk fleet odds I can live with, and than do the maths on how many damage is a person likely (just on average) to have prior to their 2nd,3rd,4th, etc, voyage.. and then show me the stats on the likelihood of exhausting the damage deck in each of those starting positions.
Now I'll know how often a person hits the limit in a game. I suspect it's significantly more often than 1 in 4500 (for a starting deck of 12). But maybe it's barely 1 in 4,000.
The point here, is that a deck of 15 might only make hte problem go from common to infrequent, when the designer wants the impact to be hardly ever.
P.S Point taken that you really only care about the first-turn death. But perhaps the others are just as important. Design for that.
Isn't this problem going to be worse than calculated? Drawing 10 damage card in the third turn after having 2 sail 1 damage turns still feels pretty brutal and the chances for that are way higher I guess.
What about giving all damage cards a number that indicate whether you add them or not, otherwise you add 1. So if you have a very high exploding roll you might still add 8 cards in one turn but (because those cards are numbered 1/2/3/4/5/7/9/12 or something and you rolled +13) so you add all of them. You can have the last damage card(s) simply have a block symbol which means no more than 1 is added at any time.
This then makes it so that very bad rolls are slightly less bad when you already have some damage, and that after a very bad roll you always guarantee some chance to finish the game but still make it very bad if you roll very high.
It also lets you tweak the amount of damage cards and the speed with which they are added relative to the die roll (decoupling)
Not knowing the game entirely, I thought once you reached the damage max, you could remove a non-damage card from the deck as a possibility.