Entertainment: High seas regatta as a card game: crowdfunding until Monday

The target group includes cruising and sofa sailors as well as regatta cracks, tacticians and strategists - in short: young and old sailing fans alike. The card game has been available to buy in France for a year now under the name "Les milles nautiques" ("A thousand nautical miles").

A German version will be available from March 2022 under the title "Ocean Race". However, the crowdfunding campaign for the production is still ongoing. By Monday, 6 December, the developers want to raise the remaining sum of a few hundred euros of the total of 5,000 euros.

Thoroughbred sailor as game developer

The brains behind the parlour game are the French mini 6.50 sailors Cédric Faron and François Denis. The German mini-skipper Lina Rixgens has translated it. Thanks to her studies in Belgium and two mini-transat campaigns in France, she not only speaks fluent French, but also masters the pitfalls of the corresponding sailing vocabulary in the foreign language. Faron, Denis and Rixgens know each other from the 2017 Mini-Transat.

Given the inventors' passion for sailing, it's no wonder that there are "sailing instructions" instead of rules. This states that the aim of the game is to be the first boat to complete a 1500 nautical mile course. If more than three boats take part in the game, it is only a thousand miles.

Doldrums, collisions and other disasters

The players slip into the role of the skipper and get an impression of all the challenges that an ocean race entails - or can entail. They have to survive doldrums, avoid collisions, run aground and experience many things that in reality are tantamount to catastrophe - but can provide entertaining excitement in a sociable group.

The financing phase will run until 6 December on the Crowdfunding platform Startnext (click). Anyone who contributes at least 25 euros is expected to receive a game in March 2022, once production is complete.