Okay, in my humble opinion (and being both a RL sailor and fisherman, I feel I have some small expertise in this area) the idea of putting games of this sort into cantr is stupid and useless. If you want to play chess or checkers or whatever, there are plenty of websites out there to do it. Doing it in Cantr is a waste of our bandwidth and minutes. And what does it do for our characters? Nothing other than a little extra RPing. As someone earlier in the thread pointed out, there isn't enough RPing with static groups (such as several people on a ship) as it is. If that doesn't keep you occupied, then find another game to play in the meantime.
Now, back to what this thread was originally about. Giving sailors something to do. And I'm not talking about board games or anything like that. Fishing has been suggested several times, and I like that idea. I'm an avid sailor, and I've been on a boat for up to a month at a time, and I know that fishing is a very valuable thing to do while on board. Not only will it keep you somewhat occupied setting it up, or catching something, or preparing it to eat, but it also provides food that you didn't have before. A nice big yellowfin tuna is a welcome change after eating nothing but cups of soup (or in Cantr's case, potatoes or something) for days and days on end.
How do I propose to implement fishing onto boats, though? Well, I noticed we already have what I call "passive projects" (I'm sure there's a more official name for them) such as drying meat. You can leave it alone, and it will produce whatever it's going to produce automatically. You could implement this and call it "trolling" (or "trawling" if you like) and it would require a fishing pole and it would produce a small amount of fish per day. The type of fish can be chosen, if you like, or just become a generic resource called "fish" that can be salted, smoked, etc. Another passive project that could be done would be evaporating water, which is very simple in concept. You take a small amount of salt water, put it in a bowl or plate, and let the water evaporate, leaving behind sea salt. Trust me, it works, I've done it before. It's not great salt, but it's salt nonetheless. As for the salt water, you shouldn't need to have a project to collect it. In reality, it's everywhere, and collecting it takes no time at all.
In addition to that, a more active project would be active fishing. This works in the same way as resting in that there is no set amount of time that you say you want to fish for. Every turn, you have a random chance of acquiring "fish" or not. This could be from a small amount to a substantial amount. You should be notified in your events log when you "catch" a fish, and the amount that you caught. You would continue fishing, uninterrupted, upon catching said fish.
Now, this would give sailors something to do for the long periods of time that they are at sea, and allow them to stay out at sea longer on smaller vessels. I know some people say there should be more reasons for ships to have to come into port more often than they do, but really, where's the fun in that? If my character is on a boat, it's because he doesn't want to be on land. No need to force that upon him
