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The longest night, aground off Croatia

You are aground. Off Croatia, half past eleven at night, crew on board. Nine decisions lie ahead of you, and each one changes what gets paid out at the end. There is no right path, only expensive ones and less expensive ones. At the end you see what the policy pays and what you carry yourself.

Reading the result

What the longest night is testing, and how to read the payout

The longest night is not a quiz with a right answer at the end. It is a decision game built on the logic of a real hull claim after a grounding. You are aground off Croatia, the crew is on board, and the game hands you nine decisions in sequence: what to do in the seconds after the thud, whether to accept help and from whom, when to call the insurer, whether to let the yard start, and how to answer the surveyor and the claim form. Every choice writes a line into the ship’s log and changes an internal account that only becomes visible at the end. There is no undo. That is deliberate: at night, on a shoal, you only get to decide once as well.

The final screen shows a payout and, beneath it, the settlement that leads to it. Read it line by line. The damage to the boat is the repair cost that your decisions allowed to grow or kept small. Money spent on averting a bigger loss (a tow boat, an emergency seal, a diver’s survey with photos) appears as a separate line and is added, not deducted, because a hull policy commonly treats such sue-and-labour costs as part of the claim even when the measure fails. Then come the deductions: a reduction for gross negligence, a reduction for a repair begun before the insurer agreed to it, and the deductible of the policy. A false statement on the form, or old damage slipped in with the new, ends the settlement at zero, however genuine the grounding itself was.

The number is driven by the size of the damage, the cost of the measures that limited it, the care you showed as the night went on, and the quality of your documentation. Care and documentation never appear as amounts of their own, but they decide whether a reduction applies at all and how contestable the settlement becomes. Photos before tidying up, receipts instead of cash, a claim reported before the yard starts: none of that costs anything, and all of it moves the conversation away from the cause and towards the repair.

The case is invented and the amounts are orders of magnitude, not a promise for any individual claim. The settlement follows the wording of one hull policy; other wordings handle the same points differently in detail, so the useful exercise is to hold your own policy against the game. Does it pay sue-and-labour costs? How does it treat gross negligence? Does it require the insurer’s go-ahead before repairs beyond emergency measures? What happens to a claim that contains a false statement? The mistakes players make most often are the ones that feel like good seamanship in the moment: full power astern before checking the bilge, carrying on with an engine that has lost its cooling water, and letting the yard start because the crew is on holiday and the days are running out. Play it again as carefully as you can and compare the ship’s logs.