Iron Ships and Wooden Heads - game report

Following a request from another member* of Sheffield Wargames Society I brought along my Iron Ships and Wooden Heads game.  I mentioned this game a while back - see here for the earlier post and here for the scenario briefing.  The game was set in the 1930s and involved two (entirely fictional...) South American countries. 

This scenario takes place after a period of rising tension between the Basque Republicand the Republic of Castile. The main issue is that of the disputed Purile Islands (Islas Purilas?) which lie some 200 miles east of the mainland, with the Basque Republic to the north-west, and the Republic of Castile to the south-west. This scenario can be played on a six by four foot table, laid out as follows:

The disputed Puerile Islands - two small (no more than 6 inches long) islands in the south-eastern corner of the table, and a small island in the centre of the table.

Jerry, Mark and Kayte led the Navy of the Basque Republic while the Castillian fleet was admiralled by Martin and welcome new arrival and old friend Tim C.  Above is one of the Basque squadrons - a pair of destroyer flotillas lead a battleship, carrier and light cruiser.  All 1/6000 scale Hallmark ships from my collection.

A Basque aircraft searching for the enemy.  A 1/1200 scale Hallmark model.  Maximum visibility was 18 inches.

The Castillian 'heavy cruisers'.  These were in fact pocket battleships with 11-inch guns.

A daring destroyer attack resulted in Crapo being crippled.  She was sunk soon afterwards.

The fleets manouevre.  Apparently all this was part of a plan...

The Castillian cruisers were soon heavily engaged.  At this point they needed a good NIP (Nautical Initiative Points) dice to effect some repairs.  Reducing a cripple marker to a hit costs 2 NIPs.

As a Castillian Admiralty spokesman said at the time - "Bollocks."

By now the next lot of Castillians were closing in - a pair of shiny new foreign-built battlecruisers.  Given the foregoing events Martin decided to "bugger off home."  I wonder if that expression appears in the Royal Navy's signals handbook...

*he didn't show up for the game.  Cheers Mick.

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.

A question of scale

This is one of the photos I took for the new edition of Air War Games, which I thought I'd share with you. I wanted to easily demonstrate the differences between some popular scales and hit upon this. The Bf 110 is the only aircraft I have in so many scales!

Luftflotte von Gow

About ten years ago I bought a huge and mostly painted batch of Halmark 1/6000 scale WW2 warships, and a couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to be able to reunite them with a collection of 1/1200 scale aircraft painted by the same chap.  As the paintwork is really rather nice (and better than I can manage), my work has been confined to rebuilding and painting the stands and attaching small squares of magnetic material to them.  This means they can now be stored and transported in a slimline foolscap box file.

Some of the German models, including Ju-52, Bf-110, Ju-88 and He-111.

There are also a lot of Italian aircraft, together with smaller numbers of Brits, Americans and Japs.

A nice new laser printed box label.

The (almost filled) box.  To save your eyes and sanity I risked my own by counting them.  140.