cannon, but there were variations with spells. Boarding: These decks focused on catching the opponent and entering boarding. They usually used big ships with lots of crew and had a nice spread of cards. 'Speed Boarding': These decks focused on catching the opponent in a boarding during the first or early second turn. If they couldn't, they usually lost. The ships these decks used were small and had small sailing requirements. 'Control': These rare decks tried to complete the secondary control victory condition. They were the harder decks to construct competitively. Even within these broad categories, there were many ways to carry out any given strategy. For example, a boarding deck might use only the captain to deal damage while the rest of the crew absorbed hits, or it might use small attacks with pistols and weak characters or it could just have a nice spread. One could use boarding action cards to enhance the attacks or to just absorb damage. One could also use attachments to win the attacks more easily, or adventures to inflict more damage etc. Combining various strategies was not uncommon, such as a boarding deck that used a big cannon attack before the boarding to soften the enemy. Game play Start At the start of each game, players used their captain's starting Wealth statistic to recruit their starting crew. Since the starting crew could be anyone from the deck, it was a nice tactic to have some backup crew in the deck for specific situations (much like a sideboard, only built-in). A captain's starting Wealth usually ranged from 7 to 10. Players typically chose a crew with high Influence statistics to start a game, although speed decks often preferred Sailing, Swashbuckling, and Cannon. Phases Each turn has 3 phases. The first phase is used to determine which player goes first; the second phase, the most important one, is where the game is actually played and the final phase is the end of turn were all resources are replenished (by untacking and drawing cards). Unlike in many games where a player performs as many actions as he wishes before passing to the next player, in 7th Sea each player performs only one action, and players pass to one another until none choose to take further actions. In the main phase, starting with the first player, each player performs an action or passes and then play proceeded