Come Sail Away

Earlier this week I performed a couple of Age of Sail experiments.

Previous experiments utilized my scratch built ships (which I made in the early 1990s!)

Because of their masts, these ships don't fit well into my portable wargame boxes. I've been thinking about creating some counters, like Fantalonia's. I don't have a functioning color printer at home, so these counters have been shelved for the moment. However, I have some pieces of craft wood. A little snipping and painting later and I have 2 fleets.

I also dabbled with rules today.

First, I used an idea from Aelred Glidden's As Per Margin rules (in MWAN 109). Roll 2 dice to determine movement. Use the higher die if moving with the wind or the lower if against. Because my board is small, I halved the movement rates (e.g. a roll of 5 or 6 = 3 squares). To speed the process, I rolled per squadron instead of per ship. Overall, I felt that this was a positive experiment. It gave some variability to movement that made things interesting.

For combat, I rolled 2 dice per ship, needing a 4+ (5+ at long range) to hit. Given that ships could only take 3 hits before striking, this could get bloody fast. Thus, I added a couple of rules to lessen damage. First, ships could make repair rolls; for each hit roll 4+ remove a hit. Then halve the number of hits to determine permanent damage.

Here is a shot of my ships in action.

This was after several turns of battle (half of the Blue navy has sailed off the board without damage). Black markers indicate hits and orange represent permanent damage. After repairs, these 4 hits translated into 2 points of damage. At the end of the game, Blue had no damaged ships while Red had 3 (one seriously with 2 damage). These changes seem to be working.

Once again I had a game partner. This time Onyx watched without disturbing the pieces (although he sat on my box).