Altay: Seafarers Expansion

Altay: Seafarers Expansion

WBG Score: 8.5

Player Count 2-4

You’ll like this if you like: Deck building, area control, asymmetric factions, exploration, and expansions that feel like the final piece of the puzzle.

Published by: Ares Games

Designed by: Roberto Di Meglio, Fabio Maiorana

This is a free review copy of the game. See our review policy here

Altay: Dawn of Civilisation was already a strong game. Its mix of deck building, area control, asymmetric factions and light civilisation development gave it a distinctive feel, even if the theme sometimes faded behind the cards and resources. I gave the base game an eight out of ten because, with the right group and faction mix, it offered an enjoyable race to expand, develop and get your settlements onto the board before anyone else could do the same. You can read about that here.

Seafarers takes that solid foundation and completes it. It adds a new board, proper sea travel, ships, crews, naval support, new cards and a fifth faction in the mysterious Waterfolk. None of these additions completely transform Altay into a different game, but together they fill a gap that was always visible on the original board. The sea is no longer decorative space sitting between the interesting parts. It becomes another route, another weapon and another opportunity. This feels less like an optional side module and more like the final section of the game arriving slightly late.

What Does Altay: Seafarers Add?

Seafarers introduces three major additions. The first is the Forgotten Sea, an entirely new board built around four sea zones and a collection of harbour territories. The second is a full set of seafaring rules, allowing players to build ships, move them around the board, travel between distant territories and support battles from the water. Finally, the expansion adds the Waterfolk, a completely new faction that manipulates the sea without using conventional ships or crews. They have Dolphins!

The expansion includes ships for each of the original factions, crew tokens, Wavebending Dolphin tokens, new starting cards, additional market cards and new achievement cards. You can use these systems with the new Forgotten Sea board or add them to the original board, giving you a welcome amount of flexibility over how much change you want.

The new board is the main event. It immediately gives the game a stronger sense of geography, with players beginning in harbour territories and looking across the water towards islands, remote land and potential targets. It also makes the board feel more connected. Areas that would previously have been far apart can now become neighbours through a shared sea zone, provided you have the ships, or Dolphins, to reach them.

How Does Seafaring Work?

Each original faction adds a Shipwright card to its starting deck. When played, this places one of your ships into a sea zone adjacent to one of your settlements. Ships can later be spent to build settlements on neighbouring lands across the shores, or launch attacks across the water, effectively treating territories connected to the same sea zone as adjacent.

Travelling farther requires multiple ships, with one spent for each sea zone crossed. This allows you to leap across the map, reach isolated territories or threaten another player from a direction they may not have expected. It creates new possibilities without requiring a completely separate naval phase or a pile of additional rules.

Ships can also support regular combat. Any ship in a sea zone adjacent to the battle can be removed to add one strength to an attack or defence. Ships used for sailing cannot also be used to boost that same attack, so you still need to plan ahead rather than simply throwing every boat into one giant assault. Crews make ships more efficient because you may remove the crew instead of losing the entire ship when it is used.

This all sounds like it might turn Altay into a combat-heavy game, but it does not. Combat is not suddenly dominant, nor does every game descend into fleets smashing into each other. Each player only has three ships, and you use them for travel more than anything else. Instead, fighting becomes a little more interesting because the direction of an attack is less predictable. Players can posture from the sea, protect a coastline or create a route to territory that would previously have been inaccessible.

The base game’s combat could occasionally feel blunt. You were next to someone or you were not, and your deck either supported a fight or it did not. Seafarers introduces more nuance. A ship might be used to travel, defend, threaten, settle or simply force an opponent to think twice. That extra layer gives the board more life without changing the heart of the game.

The New Cards

The additional action cards are built to support sea travel, but most of them have enough flexibility to avoid feeling completely useless when your plans change.

Shipwrights place ships, while Sailors can move a ship, add a crew or act as Warriors during combat. Explorers are particularly useful because they can either provide three coins or resettle one of your settlements into an adjacent territory. That movement can be combined with sailing, creating some clever ways to relocate across the map without building an entirely new settlement.

Astronomy gives players another route onto the water. Once completed, it lets you discard a card to gain a temporary sailing effect each turn, even without an available ship token. It is a useful piece of technology for players who want access to the sea without packing their deck with too many seafaring cards. Although, I did already have this form the Seafarers promo mini expansion.

This does create a potential concern. Altay already asks players to manage a deck where the wrong combination of cards can leave you with resources or actions that do not line up neatly. Adding more card types risks making that problem worse. Some players have criticised Seafarers for increasing deck bloat without fixing those occasional dead turns, and that criticism is understandable.

However, I did not find the new cards as disruptive as that argument suggests. Sailors have multiple uses, Explorers provide money when movement is not helpful, and the sea is relevant enough on the new board that Shipwrights rarely feel completely disconnected from the rest of your plan. You still need to build your deck carefully, but that was already true in the base game.

The optional Trading rule is also compulsory when using the new board, which helps by allowing unwanted resources to be converted into coins. That does not remove every awkward hand, but it gives players another way to turn excess production into something useful. We always played with this anyway.

The Waterfolk

The Waterfolk are the expansion’s most exciting addition. They do not use ships or crews at all, instead controlling the sea through Wavebending tokens and their unusual starting cards.

A Wavebender can place a token in one of your territories, an adjacent sea zone or another sea zone that already contains one of your tokens. Removing that token can then produce any resource or, when removed from the sea, create the same effect as spending a ship. The Wavesinger can either produce culture or replay an action card from your discard pile, giving the Waterfolk excellent flexibility and the potential to build a strong, healthy deck.

Their strength is not simply travelling across the water. They are good at resource generation, recovering useful actions and making the most of cards that have already passed through their hand. They can feel smooth and efficient when played well, particularly once the discard pile offers several useful options.

The Waterfolk feel balanced, but they are not identical in power or rhythm to the original factions. That is the point. Altay’s factions have always encouraged different approaches, so performance can vary significantly depending on your preferred style. A player who likes direct conflict may immediately understand the Firefolk, while someone who enjoys flexibility, resource control and deck efficiency may get far more from the Waterfolk.

That variation is not a balance problem so much as part of Altay’s identity. The factions are meant to feel different, and the Waterfolk continue that philosophy rather than sitting safely in the middle. They also bring purple dolphin-shaped Wavebending tokens to the table, which may not affect strategy but are objectively delightful.

A Better Board

The Forgotten Sea board is a major improvement because it makes the entire game feel more purposeful. The original Altay board had islands and large areas of water, but without the full seafaring system, some of that space felt underused. I had already played with the earlier Seafarers promotional material, so I had seen a small part of what sea travel could contribute. The full expansion makes that idea feel complete.

Starting from harbour territories immediately draws attention towards the water. The central islands and distant shores create obvious points of interest, while naval routes make expansion less predictable. A player can no longer assume that a strip of sea provides safety or that a distant opponent will remain distant for the entire game.

This improves the race element as much as the area control. Sometimes the best use of a ship is not attacking another player but reaching a valuable territory before they do. The expansion gives you more ways to place settlements, collect conquest markers and chase the game-ending condition without making the experience significantly heavier.

There are more decisions, but the rules remain straightforward. Build ships, move them, spend them to cross sea zones or use them in combat. Once everyone understands that basic loop, the additional complexity settles into the background.

Does It Make Altay Better?

Yes, comfortably. Well, its now an 8.5 for me, and was previously an 8! The base game already had the ingredients of something very good, but parts of the board and theme felt slightly unfinished. Seafarers brings exploration and maritime expansion into the centre of the experience, which makes Altay feel more like the civilisation game its presentation promises.

It still remains a fairly light and abstract game. You are not managing complex trade networks, researching enormous technology trees or running a historical empire across several hours. The theme can still disappear when players focus on icons, resources and efficient card combinations.

What Seafarers does is make that abstraction more interesting. Sea zones change relationships between territories, ships create new tactical choices, and the Waterfolk introduce a faction that genuinely approaches the game from another angle. It adds more variety without burying the accessible core beneath too many new systems.

The expansion also improves interaction without making conflict overwhelming. Players have more ways to reach each other and more options when a fight begins, but warfare remains only one possible route. A strong player can still win by building efficiently, developing technologies and racing to place settlements.

The Controversy

Some players are understandably unhappy about the way this content has been released. There are claims that parts of the seafaring system were originally included with some copies of the base game, then removed and later repackaged as an expansion. I don't know if this was the full expansion we see here, or the small promo expansion I got with my copy. But it has caused some upset.

I cannot confirm exactly what happened during production, and I do not want to present speculation as fact. However, it is easy to understand why players who already received some seafaring content might resent paying again for an expanded version of it.

My own reaction is more straightforward. I already had the promotional Seafarers cards and had experimented with a smaller version of the system, but I am still glad to have the complete expansion. The new board, Waterfolk faction, crews and full selection of naval cards provide substantially more than those earlier promotional components. Whatever the production history, the game in front of me is better with Seafarers included.

Pros

• The Forgotten Sea board makes better use of the water and creates more interesting routes.

• Ships add tactical depth without making combat dominant.

• The Waterfolk provide a distinctive and flexible fifth faction.

• Sailors and Explorers offer useful options beyond basic sea travel.

• Sea movement strengthens both the race and area-control elements.

• The expansion feels integrated rather than bolted onto the base game.

• Wavebending dolphins are excellent.

  
  

Cons

• Additional card types can increase the risk of awkward or unfocused hands.

• Players who already own promotional seafaring content may feel they are buying some small parts of this twice.

• The factions remain highly dependent on player style and familiarity.

• Anyone who disliked the abstract nature of the base game will not find it transformed here.

• It adds another layer to a game some players already felt could suffer from deck bloat.

Altay: Seafarers Review: Final Thoughts

Altay: Seafarers is exactly what I want from an expansion. It does not replace the base game’s central systems or add complexity simply for the sake of having more things in the box. It looks at what was already there, spots the underused sea and turns it into something meaningful.

Ships make travel, settlement and combat more flexible. The Forgotten Sea board creates better routes and more interesting relationships between players. The Waterfolk bring a clever new faction built around resource generation, Wavebending and using the discard pile to keep their deck working efficiently.

There are legitimate concerns about adding more cards to a game where unfocused deck building can already create dead actions. There are also fair questions around whether some of this content should have been included from the start. Neither issue changed the experience enough to reduce my enthusiasm. The original Altay felt like a strong game with one conspicuous space still waiting to be filled. Seafarers sails directly into that gap and makes itself at home. The base game was an eight. With this expansion, Altay becomes an 8.5 out of ten for me.