Leeway

The wind is real. The sea wants to sink you. The cargo will not pay for itself.

Leeway is a sailing game where the wind is modelled, not decorative. You cannot sail straight into it. A full hold sits lower, sails slower and founders sooner. Trim badly and you go sideways, which is what leeway means, and it is why the game is called that.

You owe 2,000 gold on a boat you cannot afford. Everything else follows from that.

HOW MUCH OF THE SAILING DO YOU WANT TO DO?

Pick it before you cast off, change it mid-voyage, and nothing else about the world moves.

Deckhand - she holds her course while you look at the chart. The sea is the same; the tiller is kinder.

Mate - the game as it is balanced. Weather helm you can feel, and an autotrim you have earned.

Master - no autotrim, no help. Every sail angle is yours.

This is the answer to "I want real sailing" and "I do not want to spend my evening tacking" being the same game. It moves how much the boat asks of you and nothing else: not her speed, not the weather, not the danger. How rough the sea gets is a separate dial with four settings of its own.

MERCHANT

Buy goods cheap at one island, sell them dear at another. But a fat hold sits low in the water, and the pirates know it. Use the wind, the weather and your wits to reach port before they do.

- Real sail physics: trim your main and jib to the groove, or go soft and lose ground

- A living economy: prices shift with supply, weather and what the harbourmaster is missing

- Cargo is weight: a full hold changes how she sails, how deep she sits, and when she sinks

- Evade, outrun, signal the navy, dump a decoy, but never fire back. Merchants do not carry guns

PIRATE

You carry guns. Board prizes to steal cargo without sinking them, because a sunken ship pays nothing. Build heat, spend gold at the black market, and do not let the revenue cutter run you down.

- Cannons that fire round shot, chain and grape, each of which cuts a different way

- Subdue, do not sink: overwhelm the prize's crew so you can board and take her cargo

- Five black-flag hulls from the nimble Corsair sloop to the three-masted Leviathan flagship

- Square-rigged ships sail like square-rigged ships: they fly off the wind and struggle to windward

THE SEA

- A procedurally placed archipelago that changes every new campaign

- Storm cells you can see from a distance and try to avoid, or sail straight into

- A day and night cycle driven by elapsed sailing time, not the wall clock

- Rain, fog, squalls, swells, and a barometer that tells you what is coming

SAILING TOGETHER

Host a private room, share its code, and sail as a Merchant or Pirate in the same sea. Online play is peer-to-peer, optional, and best effort: there is no public lobby browser and no relay server, so a minority of players behind strict or carrier-grade NAT will not be able to connect to each other. Single-player is fully playable offline.

OTHER THINGS WORTH KNOWING

- Gamepad support with remappable controls

- Three quality presets, so it scales down to weaker GPUs

- Playable in over thirty languages

- Optional live voice chat in private multiplayer rooms