This Wednesday John brought along a game he’d found on the internet. From long experience we know this is no guarantee of quality but we’ll try (virtually) anything once.
Thus five players assembled under John’s supervision to shove around his 1/1200 galleys. The Romans were Martin (as Octavian - his own blog post will no doubt follow soon), Graham and Simon. The er, other Romans (and Egyptians) were led by Mark Anthony (Jerry) and the beautiful Cleopatra (er, your humble correspondent)
We bid farewell to the Greek coast and floated off. We had to escape intact (some hope) or duff up the enemy fleet (even less hope!)
The overconfident Octavians were easily goaded into contact...
...and we had the best of the initial encounters. FYI, ships can take 15 hits. The white crosses are one each, yellow is a 5, red is 10.
The action soon descended into what I believe the US military calls a ‘clusterf*ck’. Even Mark Anthony’s huge ship - beset on all sides by enemies - sank.
At this point, the opposed initiative rolls - ever more important - stalled. The pair of sixes was followed by another double as tension mounted.
So who won? Well me obviously! Cleopatra’s pair of galleys slipped off - much to Octavian’s distress! We’ll draw a veil over the loss of the rest of our fleet.....
10 comments:
Thoughts on the rules? What was the name
Cheers
Matt
Looks good fun. Nothing wrong with a bit of naval action.
Cheers,
Pete.
The rules are copyverelli's 1 Hour Ancient & Fantasy Naval from the files area of https://groups.io/g/AMW (with a supplement by me which can be found in the same place).
And I think they worked really well - a simple set of rules that brought a five player game to a sensible conclusion in about an hour.
Yes, they were excellent. Resolving ramming and boarding in a single turn seemed a bit powerful, might be worth checking with the author if that was the intention.
Bluewillow
See John’s reply below.
Pete
Unless the fleets are commanded by a bunch of blundering landlubbers!
John Armatys
Agreed. The game went very well. It’ll be interesting to see if we feel the same way after a second game. I recall a DBA ancient naval variant you and I played years ago. We really liked it but in revisiting it some years later it was terrible!
Martin Rapier
I know what you mean about the ramming and boarding - but nor does it seem right to ram and then be boarded by the ramee. Like I suggested above - let’s try it agin and see what we think.
Hello I did the naval variant of the OHW rules, I am very glad that you liked it. If you think at each model as a squadron of ships, rather than a single vessel, you will appreciate the simplifications (including Ramming and Boarding in the same phase, think about a group of ships with Initiative). By the way I made a DBA naval variant several years ago, that I was very proud of, called The Bellis Navalibus... if it is the same that you played, I agree that it is horrendous!
Daniele V
Well done on your rule-writing! I agree that - as with many games - the key thing is to grasp the scale and not be thinking in terms of individual ships. I can’t recall the name of the DBA variant. My own - Iron Ships and Wooden Heads - is set in the 1930s-early WW2 era. There’s a download link from this blog.
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