Shipwrights of the North Sea: Redux

I am a big fan of Garphill’s later series, but I had completely skipped the North Sea line. With the Shipwrights Redux, I decided to fill that gap, mostly to quiet the completionist inside me a little. A bad idea for a first impression; good fortune that it was not my first encounter with Phillips: if I had started here, I would have written him off for life.

At its core, the game did not give me the sense of a process with enough depth to justify its place beside Garphill’s later designs. The game’s flow, as I felt it at the table, does not build the tension or the interesting decisions I expected from a title in this family. Each round feels more like going through the motions than something that pulls you into thinking about the next step.

Nor did I find anything in the interaction that overturned that impression. I cannot point to any particular conflict, blocking, or player-to-player dynamic that gives it character; for me, the problem is precisely that the overall experience remains flat. Having already played Architects, Wayfarers, and the rest, this feels like a far more muted, rough version of ambitions that Garphill later learned to serve much better.

I understand that it may have a place in collections belonging to players who consider Wingspan complex and deep. For me, though, next to games such as Architects and Wayfarers, Shipwrights is a suburb of Flotsenburg. Stay away.