Tabletop Game / Fire In The Hole

Following

Fire In The Hole is a dexterity-based tabletop game created by McMiLLER Entertainment released in 2022. In it, you play as pirates competing to cannonball a ship to oblivion so that you can be the first to steal its booty. Gameplay has you play cards to determine how you throw your pom-pom cannonballs into an elaborate pop-up ship, the first person to have four cannonballs of their color connecting being the winner. These cards can be advantageous (throwing two balls at once), complicating (throwing with your eyes closed), or both at once. Of course, being a bunch of scurvy scallywags means that other cards allow you to mess with the ship in other ways, from physically rotating the ship, to throwing a special black cannonball to get rid of the other players' progress.

The game was originally funded on Kickstarter, resulting in multiple editions of the game that vary from including from including extra cards and gimmicks in a special Booty Bag, to a whole Salty Seadog expansion that adds a drinking game element to play through Forfeit Tiles added to the ship.

Fire In The Hole contains examples of:

• Dexterity Game: A large part of the gameplay is physically throwing balls into squares of the ship, a player winning when four of their balls are connected.
• Dressed to Plunder: The octopus on the "Fire!" cards and the monkey in the Abandon Ship cutouts have an eyepatch and bandana.
• Expansion Pack: The Salty Seadog expansion adds forfeit tiles to the ship, with landing on one forcing you to complete a Drinking Game challenge.
• Extrinsic Go-First Rule: The instruction manual says the person who was most recently on a boat goes first.
• Eyepatch of Power: Befitting the pirate theme, setting up includes giving everyone an eyepatch. Some cards require you to put it on, making it a disadvantage in a game where depth perception is useful.
• Kraken and Leviathan: The premise of the game involves a kraken attacking a ship, and its tentacles can be seen surrounding the ship in the play area. If you have an edition with the Booty Bag, certain cards allow you to add the kraken's head and a tentacle as blockers, and its head alone is about as tall as the ship.
• Match-Three Game: To win the game, a player has to have four of their cannonballs connected.
• Out-of-Turn Interaction: Unlike the other cards in the game, the yellow Killer Cannonball cards are played after the dice are rolled and regardless of whose turn it is.
• Pirate Parrot: One of the Abandon Ship cutouts is a parrot of the typical "technicolor macaw with a crest" type.
• Sapient Ship: The ship that the game takes place on has a face and seems visibly distressed at the kraken and pillaging pirates attacking it.
• Talk Like a Pirate: Parts of the instructions and the instructional text on the cards often takes aspects from typical pirate speech:
  Fire!: Roll dice, then take yer best shot!
• Villain Protagonist: You're playing as pirates willing to take advantage of a fellow ship in distress to steal the treasure on it. Scurvy dogs, indeed.
• Walk the Plank: "Walk the Plank" is the name of the Killer Cannonball card that makes the other players have to step away from the game before throwing, and its illustration is the signature ship plank of the trope.
• "X" Marks the Spot: One card type lets you play an X tile to the board that blocks any cannonballs from landing there. The card's art more explicitly shows the trope, with the typical trail leading to the X.