1/2000 scale Napoleonic Sailing

Saturday, January 8, 2011

1/2000 scale Napoleonic Sailing

Alex ran this game for Ashley, Chris, Steve, Tony, and myself.  The rule were a combination of other games, the sailing rules were Heart of Oak while the combat rules were Wooden Ships and Iron Men.  The ships used were from Valiant.

 

The scenario included British, French, and American ships, and a bunch of British merchantmen.  The scenario began as a heavy morning fog was burning off, and one of the French ships found herself mistakenly in line with a bunch of British ships of the line.  Steve was running that French ship, and I was running the Brits, and I quickly took to battering the hell out of it as quickly as I could manage.  Unfortunately, I never did sink that darn thing!  Still, much fun was had trying…  Tony arrived late, and was quickly given this gimp of a ship, and outnumbering him 4 to 1, I was still unable to take him down.

 

At the end of the game, the other three French ships of the line were just making contact with my 4 British ones, but we never got much of an engagement off before called it a night due to the game being pretty well over on the other end of the table.  I must say that trying to sail 4 ships was a bit of an attention grabber, and therefore I can’t really speak to what happened on the other side of the engagement, other than knowing that the Americans were apparently kicking my fellow British Admirals back side…

All in all the game went well.  The rules were easy to learn, and fairly intuitive.  We had halved movement at the beginning of the game, but in hind sight, decided that full movement would probably have been better.  Alex had been afraid that the table wasn’t wide enough to allow full movement, but I think it would have been fine.  Also, while the sailing rules were not terribly complicated, they were a bit too involved to comfortably sail 4 ships.  I would suggest no more than two per player.  We will definitely be sailing again soon!