You inherit one boat and a name, nothing else. The whisper boat for six people lies on the Dorpsgracht, a year old and kept like clockwork. Money there was none.
First you get to name the business. Your grandfather never put up a sign — everyone simply said „at Grandad’s". You can invent something of your own or leave it as it was.
Then comes founding the business, and that has two steps in a fixed order:
You fetch the money from the bank account on the arcade start page — by transfer or with a bank loan (see the bank guide at /hilfe.php?thema=bank). Whenever the till is short, every buy button offers you the way there.
Once both are done, the first guests get in touch.
🎁 Grandad’s legacy. The inherited boat carries a small gift mark in your fleet — and one condition Grandad insisted on: it stays in the family for at least 10 game years. Until then you cannot sell it, neither directly nor on the used-boat market. Everything else is allowed: hire it out, service it, upgrade it, rename it, put it into winter storage. The boat dialog tells you from which year it would be free. And even then you do not have to sell — Grandad would have been pleased.
Everything happens in seven views. You will jump between them all day long.
One game day takes two real hours. A game year has 28 game days, and the harbour always shows which one is running.
The year has four periods, and they differ sharply:
Winter is not dead time, it is a phase of its own. Sleep through it and you go into the next season with unserviced boats. And a few small boats stay in the water anyway and may keep working — the fleet view tells you which.
The season is short. That is the real heart of this game: the scarce commodity is not equipment, it is time on the water. A boat sitting in the harbour earns nothing.
The winter lay-up is the quietest stretch of the game — and you do not have to sit it out.
Once winter starts, half an hour of real time runs. During that half hour you play on as normal: servicing, refits, the yard, the boat market — that is exactly what winter is for.
After that your business takes its winter break. The game pauses and waits for you. Nothing is lost and nothing breaks; time simply stands still.
Next time you look in, the new season starts right away. You can also start it yourself during the break — the button is in the harbour.
So winter costs you half an hour instead of half a day. What winter brings in work and cost — craning, lay-up, the major service — still applies in full; only the waiting is skipped.
Guests come to you on their own — even while you are away. Every enquiry tells you who is asking, how many people, which cruising area, how long, at what price and how much deposit. It also tells you in real time how long your boat will be out once you accept — a week-long charter ties it up for about three hours, a trip by the hour only for minutes. And a deadline is running: anyone who hears nothing for too long looks elsewhere.
You have three options:
The guest shops around before saying yes. What they will put up with, you only find out by trying — and get too greedy and you will get a refusal marked „too expensive".
Only enquiries that suit you come in. People ask about the waters your location serves and about boats of the kind you keep — nobody rings Giethoorn about a trip that does not start there.
Even so, sometimes there is a note instead of a button, telling you why it will not work right now. And the notes say two quite different things:
Those are not faults, they are tasks.
Your enquiry board has a capacity. When it is full, nothing new comes in until you accept or decline something. A full board is the most common reason for „nothing is happening any more".
And at the top of the tab it says when the next enquiry is due — nobody rings at night, so it tells you when things start up again.
It is never just „a guest", it is a particular sort of person. They differ in everything: how long they stay, how many they are, how harshly they rate you, how carefully they treat the boat and whether they hold a boating licence.
Before departure you also decide on the handover briefing: thorough by an instructor, thorough by you — or just a quick one if nobody is free. That is no formality, it is the cheapest damage prevention there is.
Once booked, the boat sets off. The harbour shows you when it is due back. While it is out you can neither sell nor refit it — but you can step in when something happens.
And something does happen. Some of it costs money, some costs stars, some is just a story:
And the longer your business runs and the more boats you have, the more can happen out there: a line in the propeller, a closed bridge, blue-green algae on the lake, water in the bilge, a flat battery, guests who come back late or leave something aboard, a theft overnight in a strange harbour, a noise complaint from the harbour master, a festival on the water — and on the bright side the regular who comes back, the photographer on the jetty and the newspaper that writes about you. Some of it hangs on the waters, some on the season, some on the guests. A young business with a single boat sees none of it yet.
In most of these cases you decide how to deal with it: send fuel out, send the mechanic, call a tow or a diver, be generous, charge a fee — or let the guest sort it out alone. Every choice costs you something: one money, the other stars — and some even bring something in. Whether it is worth it is exactly the kind of decision this game is about.
🔒 A theft is an insurance case. If the boat is insured you are left with the excess; if it is not, you pay it all. And because the guest is not to blame, the deposit stays untouched.
⭐ And a boat with an open incident waits until you have seen it. It does not sail on and earns nothing in the meantime, but it piles up no damage either, and nobody decides in your place. That holds even if you are away for days: the case stands still until you are back.
Alongside there are moments with no effect at all: the mute swan that takes the foredeck for an enemy. The grey heron on the pulpit. The fenders left in the locker, discovered in the Ossenzijl lock. The clog on a string that the bridge keeper lowers so you can drop two euros in. Morning mist over the lake, an otter beside the boat, a double rainbow, the wait at the lock, the wrong turning in the canal. They cost nothing and change nothing — they are simply lovely.
When a boat comes back, the most important dialogue in the game opens. It has three parts.
1. The rating. Between one and five stars. It depends on how the trip went, how strict this guest is, what was aboard and what condition the boat was in.
2. The settlement. Line by line, so you can see where the money really comes from and where it goes: charter, whatever the guest added on, fuel — if you earn on it —, agency commission, welcome basket, final cleaning, bridge tolls for the bascule bridges, deposit, damage, and at the bottom the result of this one trip.
⚠️ Only what actually came up this time is listed. Do not charge for the final cleaning and you will find none there; have no fuel dock of your own and there is no fuel income. The settlement is a receipt, not a template.
The deposit comes with a decision: if something happened, you can keep part of it — or be generous and give it all back. Both are right, just at different times.
3. What to do now. The boat is made ready and only then bookable again. If there is damage, it goes to the yard first. And if the trip touched one of the eleven cities, that appears here too.
You can always roll up your sleeves and clean a boat without staff. That costs nothing but your attention — and attention is what eventually becomes the bottleneck.
When a boat comes back it has to be cleaned before the next guest steps aboard. Who does it and who pays for it is up to you — in the business tab, in the same row as the welcome basket and the Wi-Fi.
⭐ And this is where your staff come in: if there is a boat cleaner at the location, he takes care of the final cleaning as well, and your cost for it drops noticeably. Give a lot away for free and you need a cleaner — otherwise you pay twice.
The final cleaning applies where people sleep aboard. Nobody charges a cleaning fee for three hours in a whisper boat.
Besides the basket and the Wi-Fi there are four things a guest can add to a charter. For each of them you set whether you offer it and what it costs.
⭐⭐ Linen you have to buy in and keep in stock. Bed linen and towel packs sit on your shelf, and every booking takes some off it. The business tab shows how much is left and for how many people it will do; you reorder with one button, and the delivery takes its time. Only one delivery can be on its way at a time.
⚠️ An empty shelf means the guest cannot add anything — and that annoys them. An empty shelf is the quietest way there is to spoil your stars. Look before high season starts.
⛔ Linen is never free. Unlike the basket and the Wi-Fi, none of these four can be given away — they cost you goods, and no charter firm gives goods away.
A boat does not run for nothing. But whether you earn on it depends on whether you have a fuel dock of your own.
The fuel dock is a building and is built per location. It counts only where it stands.
With the electric boats it is the other way round: they charge at the jetty, and the business pays for the electricity. That is no penalty, it is simply how it works ashore — the shore power comes out of your own supply.
⭐ And the prices are real. What diesel costs at a Dutch pump today and what a kilowatt-hour costs, the game fetches from the real market every day — just like the weather. Both are shown in the harbour. An expensive day really is an expensive day.
These are two different things, and they are easily confused.
Reputation belongs to your business as a whole. It grows with good ratings and with recommendations from happy guests. A good reputation brings more enquiries, attracts the more demanding kinds of guest and is your ticket to new locations. The books spell it out in plain words, from „nobody knows you yet" to „people book with you without comparing".
Local standing belongs to a single location. Giethoorn, where your grandfather hired out boats all his life, stays as it is — there people know the place.
⭐ A location you buy yourself starts right at the bottom — and works its way up by your hiring out from there. Not by waiting: every hire that sets off from that harbour makes it a little better known. That is why a freshly opened harbour is quiet at first, no matter how famous you are elsewhere, and why the first handful of bookings there are worth more than they bring in. Expect a new location to be carried by the others for a while.
And you can help it along. What you give away gets around: a welcome basket at no charge, Wi-Fi at no charge, a deposit returned in full despite a scratch. Free extras make you better known faster — but they also cost you. When that pays off and when it does not is your call.
The most annoying moment in the charter trade: a good enquiry comes in and every boat is out. In the past all you could do was decline.
That is what the booking book is for. Here you hold on to an enquiry even though no boat is free right now. As soon as one comes free, the entry sets off.
⚠️ A filled slot is a promise. Reserve one and then sell your only suitable boat, and you are left standing.
From 4.5 to 17 metres, from two to twelve people. Every class has its own point — none of them is simply „better".
| Boat | Length | What for |
|---|---|---|
| Small boat, 4 pers. | 4.5 m | hourly hire, electric |
| Sloop 6m | 6.0 m | open day boat — the entry boat |
| Whisper boat, 6 pers. | 6.0 m | hourly hire, electric — your inheritance |
| Motor cruiser 750 | 7.5 m | the smallest boat with berths |
| Group boat, 10 pers. | 8.0 m | hourly hire for large parties |
| Luxury sloop 850 | 8.5 m | day boat with galley and heads |
| Friesland Cruiser 900 | 9.0 m | the classic entry to weekly charter |
| RiverCruise 1060 | 10.6 m | large and still low |
| Vlet 1100 | 11.0 m | steel, two cabins |
| Low-air-draft cruiser 1150 | 11.5 m | three cabins and built low |
| Cabin Cruiser 1250 | 12.5 m | three cabins, plenty of comfort |
| Charter ship 1400 | 14.0 m | four cabins — for strangers sharing a boat |
| Canal Barge 1500 | 15.0 m | the 1968 classic |
| Luxury Yacht 1700 | 17.0 m | the top of the ladder |
Every boat also carries a hull material (steel or GRP) and a drive (diesel or electric). Both are shown on the boat and both have consequences — exactly which, you will work out over the years.
The boats people sleep aboard get a name. When you buy one there is already a suggestion in the field: leave it or type your own, and rename it later whenever you like. The little day boats and hourly boats simply go by their type with a running number — just as they do in real life.
A change of name costs €85 and is not instant: the lettering has to be sanded off and reapplied, which takes ten minutes. Until then the boat keeps sailing under its old name — the fleet view shows you how long is left. When you buy a boat the name is free: it costs nothing and applies straight away. The little day and hourly boats keep their type designation — they get no name of their own.
This is the distinction most people read straight past at first.
Three boats can have the same number of berths and still be completely different: six berths in two cabins, six berths in three. The saloon counts towards the berths — but not towards the cabins.
And guests do care. A family will happily put the children in the saloon. Two couples chartering together do not want a curtain for a cabin door. Anyone living aboard for four weeks certainly does not. That is why the boat market shows the cabin count next to the berth count — which guests take notice is for you to find out.
A side effect you only notice late: on the very largest boats the berth count goes beyond what the largest kind of guest in the game ever brings along. What those ships really offer is their cabins.
Every boat has an air draft, and some cruising areas have a fixed bridge. If one does not fit under the other, the area is closed — regardless of what the boat cost.
And this is where the comfortable assumption breaks down that bigger always means further. There are boats as long as a big cruiser and yet built lower — they slip under bridges that smaller boats cannot pass. And there are narrow canals that only the very smallest may enter.
Reach costs money, not size. Buy a low boat and you are buying cruising areas.
The fleet view shows length and height for every boat; the area view shows the lowest fixed bridge. If an enquiry is blocked because no boat fits, the game names the reason — the class or the bridge.
There is not one charter business but three. They feel entirely different, and you can pick one or run all three.
| Hourly hire | Day charter | Weekly charter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boats | the small electric ones | open day boats without berths | everything with berths |
| Duration | a few hours — or the whole day | one day, back by evening | a week and more |
| Capital | low | low | very high |
| Turnover per day | high | medium | low |
| Work | very high | high | low |
And here is the brake nobody had to build: cleaning and handover fall due per hire, not per day. A whisper boat hired out five times in a day makes five times the work of one weekly charter. Go for hours and you need cleaners and instructors — a lot of them.
Volume costs labour, value costs capital. Both work. Which suits you is a question, not a rule.
⚠️ Hourly boats only go to the nearby waters: three hours of hire will not get you to Groningen. So in a harbour with no waters for trips by the hour they cannot be bought at all — the buy button says so in plain words. That is not a bar, it is protection: such a boat would cost berthing fees and never leave the harbour. Which waters your location serves is shown in the waters tab.
🛏️ No berth, no night aboard. An open boat has no bed — it goes out in the morning and is back in the evening, in every harbour. What it does offer is the day hire: the whole hire day in one go. Anyone who wants to stay overnight needs a boat with berths.
Every boat can be fitted out. An upgrade needs installation time, and refits only happen in harbour — nobody touches a boat that is out on a trip.
There are seventeen of them, and not every one fits every boat. What decides is type, length and cabins — that is, room, a closed, dry space, and what the boat was built for. A hot tub on deck needs a deck. Air conditioning does not run without shore power. A washing machine needs shore power, a fresh water tank and a waste tank — if one of them is missing, no amount of money helps.
So a boat's upgrade list shows only what really fits this boat. Everything else is folded away underneath under "Not possible on this boat" — each line with the reason why it does not work here.
⚠️ And you can rely on this: a boat that already has an upgrade keeps it — with one exception that works in your favour: if it turns out that an upgrade is not actually possible on this type of boat, it is taken out and refunded to you at the full purchase price. You will see it in your messages. That is exactly what happened in August when the game became more realistic — nobody lost anything.
Every upgrade tells you in advance what it does to the weekly rate and what it is worth in stars. A few of them also reduce the risk of damage — and that is stated explicitly where it applies.
No berth, no boat. You cannot buy anything you have nowhere to put — the game simply will not let you.
Three ways lead to a berth:
⏳ A berth is not there instantly. The harbour master has to free it up first, and that takes time — for a rented one just as much as for a bought one. How long is shown before you agree. Buy the boat first and go looking for the berth afterwards and you have done it the wrong way round.
⚓ And every further berth at the same harbour costs more. The first is the cheapest; keep adding at the same jetty and each new berth costs you more — to rent, to buy and to keep. Your own jetty counts in the same row, it is no loophole beside it. A second location can therefore work out cheaper than a tenth berth at the first.
🔑 A berth you rent can be taken over later. You are not paying for a new berth then, you are buying out the one you already hold: rent becomes ownership and the seasonal fee falls away. It is the quiet route for a business that only wanted to get started and is now staying.
And the place matters. A berth in Amsterdam costs a multiple of one in a Frisian village — for renting as well as buying. That is shown at every location before you open it.
Big boats take more room than small ones; that feeds through to the berthing fee as well.
Five roles, each with a clear job. Every one of them can be paused instead of dismissed — otherwise staff are pure cost in winter.
The booking clerk works to a grid that you set yourself: minimum price, minimum duration and which boat classes she may let out. She takes what fits and leaves what does not. Set the grid too wide and you give away high-season prices to short bookings.
The best thing about the staff tab: it works out every day whether they pay for themselves — wages on one side, boats cleaned, repairs saved, damage avoided and extra enquiries on the other. If it says „not paying for itself right now", that is a statement.
In the business tab there is a price control for each season. You set where you stand relative to the market price — above, below or right on it. Next to it you see how many enquiries came in recently and how many are open right now. That is your feedback on whether the setting is right.
And there are four ways to get more guests:
Then there is what lies aboard. The welcome basket and Wi-Fi first have to be unlocked; after that you have a choice with both: do not offer it, charge the guest for it — or throw it in at no charge. The basket comes from a wholesaler at first; later you can pack it from your own central store, and the guests notice the difference.
That same row carries the final cleaning and the extras guests can add — both have a section of their own further up.
Insurance is neither compulsory nor a company-wide setting. You decide it per boat, and you are asked as soon as you buy one.
The boat then shows two figures and nothing else: the premium per season and what would come back in the event of a total loss. No recommendation, no advice.
| insured | not insured | |
|---|---|---|
| Repair after an incident | insurance carries most of it | entirely out of your own pocket |
| Total loss | a payout comes | nothing — boat and money are gone |
| Running cost | premium per season | none |
And this really is a decision, not a formality. The premium follows what the boat once cost; the damage hits what it is worth today. On an old tub, going without can be the sensible choice. On a new ship it is reckless. And the point where it tips moves with the age of the boat.
How much you play belongs in that calculation. Every boat is insured by default, and the premium keeps running — even when the boat hardly moves. So if you only look in briefly each day, you are often better off switching insurance off: a boat that rarely sails can rarely come to harm. If you play a lot and keep your boats busy, insurance is the right call.
⚠️ You can only switch it in harbour. Nothing changes while a boat is out — and what counts is what applied at the moment it came back.
⚠️ A boat whose repair you do not pay for does not sail. It sits at the jetty, costs berthing fees and earns nothing. That is exactly how it is meant.
Every boat has a condition, and it drops with every week it is sailed. The answer to that is the major service.
When a boat shows „⚠️ service due", it is time. One button services every boat that is due at once.
🔧 And what does it cost? That depends on the boat — an open little boat is a different bill from a yacht. The yard charges antifouling by the metre and the engine service by the engine; both grow with size, and faster than the length does.
| Boat | Length | major service in winter lay-up |
|---|---|---|
| Sloop 6m | 6.0 m | €340 |
| Small boat, 4 pers. | 4.5 m | €450 |
| Whisper boat, 6 pers. | 6.0 m | €690 |
| Motor cruiser 750 | 7.5 m | €1,100 |
| Group boat, 10 pers. | 8.0 m | €1,200 |
| Luxury sloop 850 | 8.5 m | €1,450 |
| Friesland Cruiser 900 | 9.0 m | €1,900 |
| RiverCruise 1060 | 10.6 m | €2,600 |
| Vlet 1100 | 11.0 m | €3,100 |
| Low-air-draft cruiser 1150 | 11.5 m | €3,600 |
| Cabin Cruiser 1250 | 12.5 m | €5,200 |
| Canal Barge 1500 | 15.0 m | €8,400 |
| Charter ship 1400 | 14.0 m | €9,800 |
| Luxury Yacht 1700 | 17.0 m | €14,000 |
Those are base figures for a well-kept boat. An old boat costs more — the yard simply finds more there. And the same service in mid-season costs more than in the winter lay-up.
⚠️ What counts is always the figure shown on your own boat. It applies to that boat, at its age, right now. The table here is for planning before you buy.
Add up the servicing for your whole fleet before you buy another boat. It comes back every winter — and it comes for every boat.
And then there is the engine. It counts its running hours — on the electric boats it is the battery hours of the battery bank. That is a second kind of wear, independent of the state of the hull, and no amount of servicing makes it go away.
You hear it coming: first „the engine sounds rough", later „the engine does not sound good any more". After that an engine overhaul is due, or on the electric boats a new battery bank. Until it is paid for, the boat does not move.
The game tells you how it sounds — not when the moment will come. A boat with many hours on the clock is exactly that: a boat with many hours on the clock.
Small scratches the yard deals with in passing. Beyond that there are two levels that hurt.
💥 Major damage. A repair that gets a message of its own. If the boat is insured, the insurance carries most of it and you carry your share; if it is not, you pay everything. Until the bill is settled the boat does not sail — it lies at the jetty and costs money all the same.
🛟 Total loss. The boat is gone. If it was insured, money comes; if it was not, nothing comes. That is meant literally.
⚠️ And it does not only happen out on the water. A boat can take water at its own berth — or simply sink there. Old boats especially.
Old boats break down more often, and at some point the game tells you itself that the next repair is no longer worth it: „repair X against a current value of Y — that no longer pays". The sale proceeds are shown right beside it.
A boat leaves your fleet by three routes: sold, scrapped or lost.
Not every boat still finds a buyer. For the old, tired hulls there is ♻️ Have it scrapped — in the boat dialog, right next to „Sell". You decide which of the two routes you take.
Before anything happens you see the whole reckoning: what the crane, the haulage and the disposal of fuel, oil and batteries cost — and what the engine, the electronics, your fit-outs and (on a steel hull) the scrap bring back in. At the bottom there is one figure. It can be red or green.
A well-kept boat very nearly pays for itself, because there is still something worth stripping out of it. A wreck costs you money. That is the whole point: scrapping is not a business, it is a way out.
⏳ It does not happen at once. The costs fall due straight away, then the boat is collected — and from that moment it costs you nothing at all: no berth, no insurance, no craning, no servicing. The proceeds from the stripped-out parts come in a few game days later, once the breaker is done. You do not have to stay awake for that; it carries on by itself.
⚠️ Do the sums: selling almost always brings more money. The dialog puts both routes side by side — what scrapping comes to, and what a sale would net you once the buyer turns up. But you have to find that buyer first, and it can take many game days. Scrapping buys with money what you would otherwise pay for in time: the berth is free again in two or three game days instead of thirty. If your berths are full and a better boat is waiting, that is the sum that counts.
Three things are not possible: scrapping a boat that is currently up for sale (take it off the market first — otherwise someone could buy it while it is already being broken up), one with guests aboard or in the yard — and Grandad’s legacy. Grandad wanted that boat to stay in the family; you can no more have it scrapped than sell it.
Scrapping is final. That is why the game asks you twice.
For winter the boats come ashore. Craning costs money, per boat and by size. One button lays up the whole fleet at once.
Small, shallow boats are never craned at all — they stay in the water or go on a trailer, and they are the only ones allowed to work through the winter.
Build your own winter storage shed and you not only save the cost of laying up your own fleet, you take in other people’s boats — income in exactly the period when nothing else comes in.
And winter is the right time for two things: the major service, because it is cheapest then — and the boat market, because that is when most is on offer.
💶 What the winter costs you is listed in the harbour, line by line. From the late season on, a box of its own shows the preview: craning and storage, the major service, the wages of your staff and the Wi-Fi contract that keep running through the winter, a location under construction, what your shed brings in — and the season charge (berths and insurance) that falls due in one go on the first day of the new season. In winter you see there what has already been charged and what is still to come; in the first days of the new season the finished statement. And the log carries a line for every charge — the daily costs included. Whoever wonders why the till has dropped finds the answer there without doing any sums.
Some of it you can cut: pause staff that has nothing to do in winter; uninsured boats are cheaper uninsured (and expensive when it matters); empty rented berths still cost rent.
There are three ways to get new boats, and they feel completely different.
1. The offers board — used. The normal route. Here lies whatever is available right now, each boat with its year, condition and price. When one goes, another arrives.
⭐ And the board is shared. Some of the boats come from the dealer, some from other businesses — from real fellow players in the arcade who are rebuilding their fleets. Every offer says which. A boat someone else has in hand right now is briefly locked, and gone is gone.
2. Ordering from the yard — new. Every class factory-fresh, always expensive. But: a new boat is not on a shelf, it gets built. The bigger the ship, the longer it takes — for a small boat it is manageable, for a luxury yacht it becomes a long wait.
⭐ The yard names the handover day when you order — year and day, in plain words, before you commit. Read that date, not the build time. A boat that only reaches the jetty mid-season has lost half a season already, and anyone who wants a yacht late in the game orders it long before they need it. When it is best to order is for you to work out.
After that comes the delivery trip: even a finished boat still has to be brought to you. A used boat from the board saves you the whole build and is therefore there much sooner — besides the price, that is the real reason the second-hand market is worth it.
3. Selling. You set an asking price, and the game estimates roughly how long the search for a buyer will take and what berth, craning and insurance will still cost in the meantime — leaving a net figure you can see in advance. Ask too much and you wait longer for a buyer. You can take the boat off the market at any time; the search then starts again from scratch.
A boat you buy does not appear at your jetty instantly: it has to be delivered first, and the further the way, the longer it takes.
Sometimes a boat sits on the board and nobody takes it. That is not a fault — it is the normal case for a boat with a good few years behind it.
Once the waiting time is up, the wholesaler gets in touch. For a well-kept boat he takes it off your hands without fuss. For one that has gone noticeably downhill he asks you first: he names a figure — and it is a small one, because he is not buying to trade but to break it up. You decide.
Say yes and the money is there straight away and the boat is gone. The dealer puts it back on the board for a while — anyone who wants a bargain can still pick it up there. If nobody does, he has it scrapped.
Say no and you keep your boat with every option still open: list it again, carry on chartering it, or have it scrapped yourself. Nothing is ever taken from you without your say-so.
⭐ The boat itself tells you early on when it is heading that way. If you would rather not wait for the wholesaler to ask, come down on the price in good time — a fellow player usually turns up then.
The Canal Barge 1500 is a converted Dutch freighter from 1968 — the only boat in the fleet you cannot buy new. Ships like these are no longer built.
So one turns up at the dealer now and then. Sometimes weeks go by with none in sight. If you want one, you will need patience — or a fellow player willing to part with theirs.
You start in Giethoorn, the village without roads. From there you can open further locations — up to twelve, spread across Friesland, the north and Holland:
Giethoorn · Sneek · Heeg · Grou · Heerenveen · Lemmer · Drachten · Leeuwarden · Enkhuizen · Groningen · Utrecht · Amsterdam.
The only condition is your reputation. Once it is high enough you may open — in which order is entirely up to you. Opening costs a one-off sum, needs a build time, and during that time a levy is already running: a location under construction takes no enquiries yet, but the berths already cost money. That is how building sites are.
Every location is different, and none is a clone:
⚠️ Some locations do not admit large boats at all. That is not harassment, it is protection: a cabin cruiser in a narrow village canal would be a boat you pay berthing fees for and that never sails.
The chart is the prettiest tab in the game. Sixty-seven cruising areas, from the village canal in Giethoorn to the great four-week round by way of Amsterdam, Arnhem and the IJssel.
Each area has its own conditions, and all of them are on show:
☀️ Day areas are a category of their own: out in the morning, back in the evening, no night on board. They are the reason an open boat without berths finds any work at all — and by no means every harbour has one. If you want to buy sloops, check first whether the location offers day trips. New: the day trip from Heeg to Sneek, the day loop from Heerenveen to Akkrum and Terherne, and the sheltered round through the old harbours of Enkhuizen to Broekerhaven and Andijk.
Many areas also carry a short text describing what the trip is really like: the Staande Mastroute across the IJsselmeer to Amsterdam, the Turfroute through Ossenzijl into Overijssel, the Reitdiep down to the Lauwersmeer, the ring by way of Dokkum and Leeuwarden on which you never come back anywhere you have already been.
The long trips are the best-paid bookings in the game — and they tie up a boat accordingly. That is stated in the enquiry before you say yes.
The harbour shows two weather readings side by side, and that is deliberate. They can look different without anything being broken.
⭐ If you want to know whether an area is open today, look at the weather in the business. The sun can be out there while the wind stands in here — and the other way round.
The wind is the most important reading in the game, because it decides which waters can be sailed today. Every area shows how much it tolerates; above that there is a red „closed" and a note on when it reopens. Open lakes are touchier than sheltered canals.
But the weather does not only act on the chart. In rain and storms fewer guests enquire — in sunshine more do. If the enquiries tab goes unexpectedly quiet, it is worth a look outside.
At startup it takes a moment for the real weather to arrive; until then it says so. If the weather service drops out altogether, the game carries on regardless — it never stops just because there is no weather outside.
In the Netherlands bridges are operated, and not around the clock. So the harbour regularly says: „🌉 The bascule bridges are down — nobody is setting off right now."
That is not a fault and not a punishment. It simply means handovers that are due right now wait for the next opening. When things resume is shown alongside.
For every bascule bridge on the route you also pay a toll — in Friesland genuinely into a clog on a string. On the return the item appears in the settlement, with the number of bridges beside it.
The Elfstedentocht is a legend in Friesland: eleven cities, one round. In this game it is a collection.
When a trip comes back, the settlement shows which cities it touched — and whether one of them was a first. The counter runs across your whole boat empire.
It brings in no money. It is pure prestige — and that is exactly why it counts. Get all eleven together and you have done something not every charter business manages.
Seven buildings, each with its own build time — and only one thing is ever built at a time. The first has to be finished before the next begins.
Alongside them run the side businesses at the jetty: bicycle and e-bike hire, SUP boards, canoe and kayak hire, fishing boats and a skipper service. They need no berth and no season — they bring in something every day. The skipper service does need somebody willing to go along, though.
The tab beginners overlook. This is where it says what the business really earns — separated out along exactly the lines people like to blur:
Plus the figures that tell you where you stand:
Outstanding bills are not the end of the world: they are deducted from the next money that comes in, there is no interest, and nothing else happens.
The 🏆 Best tab shows where you stand among all the boat empires in the arcade. Three lists sit side by side:
You do not have to sign up anywhere — your business is listed by itself as long as you play. And it changes nothing about your game: the list pays out nothing and takes nothing away. It only tells you how far along the others are.
Your boat empire does not stand alone. On the arcade start page sits your current account, and there all your businesses stand side by side.
Your private life is paid from that same account. A charter business that is running well carries it easily; one still being built up may not. More on that in the bank guide (/hilfe.php?thema=bank) and under private life (/hilfe.php?thema=leben).
And one more link: the welcome basket later comes from your own central store — that is, from what your other businesses produce. See market hall (/hilfe.php?thema=markthalle).
Your business till may go into the red — but not without limit. If it drops below −500 €, the business halts and stands still.
It starts again as soon as you have topped it up from your current account so the till is back at 0 €. Neither the 24-hour window nor any waiting time applies to that — that is exactly what this exception is for.
Standing still really means standing still, in both directions:
That is the whole point of the rule: you should be able to buy your way out once and then carry on normally — not drop back below −500 € in the same moment because the standstill gets billed retrospectively.
⚠️ Your current account is not affected: rent, cost of living and loan instalments keep running. It is the business that halts, not your account.
The business keeps running while you are gone. Boats come back, guests enquire and move on, costs run.
When you come back you get a report: how long you were away, how much time passed in the business, how many trips returned, what they brought in, how many enquiries came and went, and what running costs accrued.
Being away is never punished. Nothing spoils, nothing expires. If you were away for a very long time, the arcade freezes the game and only wakes it when you return — that is in the report too.
That limit is called the pause time. Everything up to it is calculated; anything beyond it never happened at all — it costs nothing, it earns nothing, and nothing breaks. The report always tells you how long your business was paused and how far it was calculated.
And how long it is, you set yourself. On the start page, below the game tiles, sits the collapsible box “⏸️ Pause setting per game” — there you choose it for each business separately. Without a setting of your own the default of 6 hours applies. For the Boat Empire you can choose 6, 12, 18 or 24 hours. Deliberately no longer, because time here runs fast-forward: one game day takes 2 real hours, so a real day is 12 game days. The default of 6 hours therefore equals 3 game days, and the full step of 24 hours 12 game days. Your choice takes effect the next time you open the game, and every click in the game restarts the clock.
A boat with an open incident waits for you. It does not sail and earns nothing in the meantime, but it does not pile up damage either. That is deliberate: the game holds the case rather than deciding behind your back.
And if anything stays unclear: every game has the ✉️ button. Marco reads every message.