Captains Bold is a game in which the players take the part of a frigate Captain involved in ship-to-ship combat during the height of the Age of Fighting Sail. In the process of playing the game, the players consider the types of tactical decisions made by their historical counterparts and explore the ways in which those decisions may have affected the outcome of single ship combats of that time. The movement and combat systems in the game have been deliberately kept simple and somewhat stylized, in order not to distract the player from the commander's decision-making process with details and decisions that would typically have fallen within the purview of his subordinates. Likewise, the specifications of the vessels themselves have been abstracted to avoid making the game too much about the hardware. The game takes place on a playing area consisting of hexagonal tiles which have a triangular grid superimposed upon them, with lighter colored dots at the vertices. The ships are represented on the playing area by counters, flats or miniatures, and move from dot to dot (referred to in the rules as "points") along the gray lines of the grid. Most of the components of the game are included in the files which comprise the game.