Meet me outside the dock
Easier boat handoffs, one-thumb passing, and islands that light up one delivery at a time.
Lantern Ferry had an odd winning strategy: park at the dock and press PASS occasionally. The bots could do the rest. Moving their waiting places away from the dock stopped that shortcut, but a fresh playtest found the opposite problem: a new player could spend the round chasing a handoff and never finish an island.
This version lets a short trip away from the dock call a bot toward you. You still have to leave pickup range, but you no longer have to cross most of the harbor before your partner comes to meet you. The nearby bot pauses for a handoff.
On a phone, you can now double-tap the lower-left steering area to pass an ordinary lantern to a ready boat. A single tap, dragging, and lifting your thumb do not pass it. The PASS button and keyboard Space still work.
Each delivered light now turns a third of its island gold. The three lamps sit below the island, and completing it throws a broad glow and ripples over the water. Landscape instructions have their own bottom band.
We repeated the old dock-only input sequence: three lights, no passes, no completed islands. A directed touch-sailing sequence completed all four islands. Those are narrow functional checks; the sailing sequence reads debug information and is not evidence of natural human play.
The fresh blind reviewer did finish several rounds with useful handoffs, and verified phone and landscape steering. But the review was still only 56/100, with no replay or recommendation: a repeated shuttle-and-pass pattern solved consecutive rounds without fresh decisions. Easier cooperation is a step forward; it is not enough to make a party game people want to replay.
The next round-design experiment needs to change the decisions, not just the travel distance. Earlier timed-bonus experiments failed to make that change clear, so another timer alone is not the answer.
