Dead Reckoning

You set Sails once before moving and move one Ocean board per Sail (move the sail cube left for each board); you may move orthogonally only. If you stop on an unexplored board you must explore it (flip it) and you may not explore more than one Ocean board in the same turn (Deckhand Rulebook, pp. 8–9).

Unused Sails do not carry over — during Cleanup you set your Sail track to 0 and cannot keep unspent Sails for the next turn (Deckhand Rulebook, pp. 8, 12).

You may buy or resolve an Advancement if your Ship is at the same location as that Advancement and you can pay its cost; Pirate vs Mercantile mode affects interactions with other players but does not prevent you from buying advances at your location (Deckhand Rulebook, pp. 10, 12).

Resolve battles in this order: 1) take Battle cubes, 2) drop Battle cubes, 3) resolve Battle abilities, 4) resolve the Battle ship (exploding shots/plunder/damage), and 5) determine the outcome; exploding shots are resolved first when processing the Battle ship (Deckhand Rulebook, pp. 17–19).

If you need cubes but have none available you may remove that many of your non‑permanent cubes from any islands and use them, provided doing so does not change control of an island (Deckhand Rulebook, pp. 14, 17).

You control an island when you have more cubes there than any other player (counting permanent cubes) and you have more cubes than the number of empty slots; when you take control you immediately place an extra permanent cube in the island’s permanent area, which counts toward control but can never be removed (Deckhand Rulebook, p. 16).