ShipShape is a collecting and sequencing game where you compete to create the highest-scoring ship full of loot. You bid for hole-ridden Crate pieces, then carefully stack them in order to form your Hold. It is part auction, part puzzle where you have to make your best guess for how overlapping Crates reveal or hide valuable cargo.

Play involves sharing a set of stacked Crate pieces and taking turns to place one in your Hold. The aim is to reveal or hide the appropriate gold, munitions and contraband by cleverly overlapping the holes in your stack of Crates. You want the most gold and munitions but not the most contraband (otherwise you get arrested).

Before drawing Crates you can peer into the stack to try and gauge which pieces you want from how well their shapes match items already in your Hold. Players then bid with their sailors to decide who goes first. You then take the Crates in turn, when they are all gone you total the scores.

You do this for three rounds, each time the trailing player gets the best starting Hold. The result is a fascinating combination of bidding against your opponents using incomplete information combined with the spacial puzzle of best organising the cargo crates that you end up with.