Our group here in Madison games many of the naval periods.

For ancients, we use "Trireme" with the Navwar and CinC 1/1200 boats. It is an old AH board game that shows its roots as a mini game. We use one of the Geo-Hex printed mats and the game translates directly to the table - we are thinking of converting to turning radii and inches at some point.

For Age of Sail we like both Wooden Ships & Iron Men (AH again!) and Heart of Oak (really brings out the difficulties of handling a sailing vessel, which some of us like - the firing aspect is more abstracted). WS & IM we modified to use inches and turning circles. Recently, following an article in the Canadian Wargamers Journal, we tried a modified Man 0' War with the hopes of trying to do Trafalgar or some such in a reasonable period of time. It wasn't too bad.

For the ACW naval actions, we use a modified form of Yaquinto's Ironclads. Since the ground scale was 3x the ship scale and 3 min. turns in the board game, we cut the scale by 3 (1/1200) and made each turn 1 minute, and use the games charts as is. It is nice to be able to have both model and ground scale the same for visual effect and with a 6 foot wide table being about,a half a mile,wide,~ you can,model most river engagements easily. The change of scales does, however, introduce more maneuver into the game; and makes you very aware of just how long it takes to reload some of those big guns!

For the Transitional period, we use both a set of house rules that one of our members worked up and I have run several scenarios using the Age of Iron Expansion rules. They have a good period feel and each player can handle several squadrons of ships quite easily.

Finally, for WW I and WW II we use General Quarters but modified with a version of the Fletcher Pratt ranging system. Either way, straight or modified, it gives a quick and enjoyable game. Sorry for going on so.