El Almojarife

About the game

El Almojarife puts you in the shoes of a small merchant around the year 1480, with one ship, a few thousand coins and a chart of the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic coast. Thirty-three ports, from La Coruña to Algiers, each with its own prices. Cloth is dear where nobody weaves it, fish is nearly free where the boats come in, and pepper and silk cost a fortune everywhere. The whole game is the old trader's trick: buy where a good is plentiful, sail, and sell where it is scarce.

That is only the beginning. Wind and storms decide how long a voyage takes, and pirates may be waiting on the way. Ships need crews, repairs and captains you can trust. Later you can set automatic routes so a ship shuttles by itself, rent a warehouse, put up workshops, borrow from the bank and take on contracts from the town council. Reports show where the money went, and messages tell you what happened while you were at sea. Each port also has a city view with its buildings and plots, which you can open to build up your own corner of the town.

The game was made by Marco Tevar and is still a beta, so rough edges are expected. The author says that much of the code and art was made with the help of AI.

Playing it here

Click Play and choose Start to found your house: pick a name, a home port, a difficulty and a character. A short tutorial takes you through the first run: open the Market in your home city and buy something cheap, go back to the map, right-click a port to sail there, press Resume to let time run, then sell the cargo at a profit when you arrive. After that the game lets you set up automatic routes and visit the Town hall.

The game is made for a desktop browser, with a mouse and a keyboard; it does not work well on a phone. Progress is saved in your browser, on this device only: Continue on the title screen picks up where you left off, and the Menu in the game has save slots plus export and import of saves. The interface is in English and Spanish; the ES / EN button switches between them.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Left-click does not sail. Select the ship and right-click an explored port. If the destination is not valid the route preview turns red.

Keep cash for the bills. The cargo in the hold is not money. Upkeep and the weekly settlement are paid in coins, so do not spend everything on goods.

A price is not a profit. Compare the buying price with what the destination pays and with the days of sailing. Stock and prices change while you travel.

Back up your saves. It is a beta and older saves may not carry over to newer versions. The export in the Menu gives you a file you can keep.

Credits and licence

El Almojarife was created by Marco Tevar (HALCONDEORO on GitHub). The code and data are released under the MIT licence; the original art and documentation are under CC BY 4.0, and the author describes the art as made with the help of AI. This is the v0.5.0-beta.4 release; apart from removing a link to the project's GitHub wiki, the game is served unchanged.

The coastlines and the sea chart use Natural Earth data (public domain, made with Natural Earth), and the coordinates of some port cities come from OpenStreetMap data, (c) OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. Sound effects are CC0 (Kenney, rubberduck, kindland, William Hector, RandomMind, eXpl0it3r, StarNinjas, randommind, bobjt, rango-mango); the menu music is a CC0 recording of John Dowland's 1597 piece by Of Far Different Nature. The sailing music is "A Tale of Water" by InspectorJ (CC BY 3.0), the village music is "Peaceful Village Loop" by elerya (CC BY 3.0) and the tavern music is "Dragon Tail Tavern" by jan125 (CC BY 4.0). Five settings icons are from game-icons.net by Lorc and Delapouite (CC BY 3.0). The 3D port view uses three.js (MIT) and a city generator by Nikita Galadiy (MIT). The full credits and licence texts are linked from this page.