PILOTAGE

Bring the fleet home. Every boat needs a mooring of her own.

At dusk a fishing fleet comes home to an anchorage among the islands. You run the pilot launch. Take each boat in tow, bring her to a free mooring, and once she is moored she stays there for good. Every boat is towed the shortest way through the channels, round every island, and the whole fleet's towing is scored against the least it could possibly be.

Hold a direction and the launch steers. With a boat on your line, the number at the top of the screen, TOW, is how far she would be towed if you moored her right where you are. It changes with every step. The nearest free mooring is always the one it likes best, and taking the closest boat to the closest mooring, again and again, leaves a far boat with a far mooring at the end.

Every anchorage has a proved least towing

For every anchorage the game works out the least towing any pairing of boats with moorings could give. That is the PAR on screen. Match it for GOLD, come within two steps for SILVER and four for BRONZE. Anything more is LONG TOWS, and the next anchorage waits until you do better.

Pass an anchorage and X shows the least towing, every boat on her best mooring. Miss it and you get a clue instead: how many boats need another mooring, and one of them ringed. Where they go is still yours to find. Learning to see the whole fleet before you moor the first boat is most of the game.

Play it in your browser first

The free edition on this page is ten anchorages. The $5.99 Windows download is forty, most of the later ones with fleets of eight, a harbour log of every anchorage you have brought home, and an ending. Every boat in every fleet is drawn by the game from her own rig and sail cloth, so no two in a fleet are alike.

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Controls. Arrows or WASD: hold to steer. Mouse or touch: hold a finger where you want to go and the launch steers there; tap the launch to act. Z on a waiting boat takes her in tow; Z on a free mooring moors her (it asks first, Z again to moor, X to change your mind); Z on the boat you are towing casts her off. X for back and the best tows (or a clue), P to pause, M to mute. On the anchorage screen, Left and Right change anchorage, Up opens the harbour log and Down shows the rules; on a touchscreen, swipe in that direction.

Paid, from the same studio: MILLWRIGHT ($5.99), raise three windmills so every farm's cart has the shortest road · ROOTWORK ($5.99), grow a seed's roots down to every pool of water, sharing every path you can · NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99), clear every street of a snowbound village before dawn · everything else at csaf.itch.io

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Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Every anchorage is generated by the game's own code, and the least towing for each is computed by that same code. The browser edition's source is unminified.

AI disclosure: the code, art and text were made with generative AI assistance, and the cover illustration was generated with an image model. The music and sound effects are procedural synthesis from note data, not the output of a generative audio model.