Games Like Catch Command '98

January 15, 1998. Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

The Bering Sea snow crab season opens today. Two hundred and twenty-nine boats are going out after a quarter of a billion pounds of opilio, and nobody knows how long it will stay open: a few weeks, maybe two months, until Fish and Game reckons the fleet has taken its guideline and faxes the closing. Every pound you land before then counts. After it, every pot still in the water is a pot you have to go and get.

You own a small company: three boats, a mortgage on them, and $400,000 in the bank. Eight rival companies are out there with forty boats between them. The race runs season after season, from 1998, through the 2000 crash, to 2005 when it ended and the fishery went to quota.

How it plays

Know Your Skippers

Each skipper has a nature of his own: bold or careful, greedy, loyal, proud, iron, sharp, or a drinker. Each thinks something of you, and it shows in their work. A skipper who is devoted to you works his gear faster and takes your orders without complaint. One who has soured drags his feet, soaks his gear longer than you asked, refuses orders, asks for a bigger share, and in the end could walk off the boat. You can fire one and hire another, or take on a rival's man who wants a berth.

The Bering Sea in winter

The pack ice comes down over the grounds each winter as it did historically, and closes the ports under it. In a gale the spray freezes on the rails and the stacked pots faster than the crew can break it off, and a boat carrying too much weight high goes tender, lists, and can go over. Cut the stack loose and lose the pots, or hold on and bring her through. Storms come in on the forecast, squalls show on the radar, hands get hurt, engines fail and the pot block's hydraulics give out.

Rivals fleets

It is 1998: there is no satellite tracking, and nobody posts their catch. You see a rival boat when she is on your radar, hear her deliveries at the dock a day late, and hear her skipper on the radio naming a block and a catch, which may even be true. Stand by one of their boats in trouble, or tow her in, and her company remembers; set your gear across one of their strings and they remember that, too. A friendly company's skippers give your gear room. A hostile one's crowd it. Between seasons the rivals buy boats, sell them, and sometimes go under.

Historically Accurate Campaign

The campaign's seasons are based on historical data. The crab are laid on the bottom from NOAA's summer trawl surveys and, where the Alaska Department of Fish and Game recorded it, the fleet's catch block by block. The guideline, the size of the fleet, the prices, the ice and the closing dates come from Fish and Game's reports. In 1999 the catcher boats sit in port three days over the price. 2000 is the crash: the guideline cut by over 85%, the opening held until April by the ice, and eight days to fish. By 2005 the derby is six days long, and then it's over: what your company caught over the seasons becomes its share of the quota.

What's in it