Iron Ships & Wooden Heads

A DBA-based game, ISWH was written by me in 2001 and was inspired by a pre-Dreadnought game - De Bellis Navalis by Colin Standish - which appeared in Wargames Illustrated a year or two earlier.  ISWH was duly published in the same magazine in 2002 and, on being demonstrated at Wargame Developments Conference of Wargamers that year, inspired original DBA author Phil Barker to design his own pre-Dreadnought game - Damn Battleships Again.

ISWH was designed to cover the 'big gun' era of naval warfare, say from 1910-1940.  It's not really intended for later WW2 actions with all singing and dancing aviation and radar but feel free to try it.
The core period I had in mind was the mid 1920s to mid 1930s, as this can be seen as a transitional period where many new technologies were available - carrier aviation, shore based bombers, ocean-going submarines etc - but no-one was entirely sure it would work in combat conditions.

ISWH also provided a means for playing through some scenarios inspired by an earlier Conference of Wargamers game based on the 1930s naval arms race between three fictional South American countries.  I will post a couple of scenarios later.

For these games we used my 1/6000 ships and 1/1200 scale aircraft - all made by Hallmark.  All ships are mounted on square bases (sizes vary according to ship type), and while this is not strictly essential it does make life (and the game) a lot easier.

A hastily posed photo of some Italian ships, complete with a seaplane on a recce mission.