A friend of mine (I’ll refer to him as Mr B) invited me to partake in the first outing of his ship-o’-the-line game. Alas! he hadn’t really thought it all out… the rules he had cobbled together just didn’t work. His thought was to develop a simple “beer and pretzels” game, but he didn’t even reach that high.
The ships themselves were very nice… they were about 3 inches long… Mr B had spent hours on detailing the rigging with little strands of thread, and painting the gundecks and the pennants and so on.
There were three classes of ships… a ship o’ the line, a frigate, and a sloop. The big guys were the ships of the line… they had 3 gundecks, and tossed one fire die (6-sided) for each deck. Next were the 2-gundeck frigates, which tossed 2 dice, and the lowest of the low, the sloops, tossed only a single die.
Close range was defined to be 3 inches… within that range, a toss of a 5 or 6 resulted in a hit on the target ship. At long range (up to 12 inches), only a 6 would hit. And when you tossed your dice, you had to note if you were aiming at the sails, or at the hull or at the gundecks.
The rules sheet wasn’t clear as to how many sail hits would completely disable a ship, and Mr B’s on-the-spot ruling was that, for each hit on the sails, you lost one of your movement dice. When they moved, sloops tossed three 6-sided dice for movement,. frigates tossed 4, and ships of the line tossed 5.
In similar fashion, 10 hull hits knocked out a ship of the line, 8 hits destroyed a frigate, and 6 hits destroyed a sloop.
All this seemed reasonable to me, but having the gundecks as a target didn’t quite make sense to me… how do you aim specifically at the guns? Mr B wasn’t clear on this… lots of discussion ensued, and the result was that the concept of aiming for the guns was tossed out.
Our scenario pitted 2 divisions of British ships against 2 divisions of Spanish ships. A division consisted of 2 or 3 ships and in the sequence, they sailed together in unison.
Each division was given a card, all the cards were mixed into a single deck, and when your division card was drawn, you moved your ships. Also included in the deck were a couple of “all ships move simultaneously” card… and when these appeared, every ship on the table advanced.
The simultaneous movement ploy immediately gave rise to problems. For example, as a Spanish commander, my ship was about to “cross the tee” of a British frigate… and as soon as the British guy saw this, he moved away. This really didn’t approximate simultaneous movement to me. More discussion, and the simultaneous movement was dropped.
Missing from the rules were any references to fires aboard ship. The sides just banged away at the opposing ships until all their hull boxes or sail boxes were crossed out. More discussion, and Mr B promised that in the second edition, he’d include something about fires on board.
And he also said he’d look into the “critical hit” area… after all, if you’ve got a ship game, you’ve gotta have critical hits.
There was a big wind arrow on the field, but the only restriction placed on ship movement by the wind direction was that you couldn’t sail directly into the wind. This was fine with me… whenever I generate a sailing ship game, I, too, tend to forget about the wind, but the true naval buff would lose his Wheaties if the wind had no effect on movement.
There was also a ploy concerning the weather… at first, every draw of 3 cards in the sequence deck and we’d dice for a weather change. I wasn’t quite sure of the time span of the turn, but this seemed to be a rather rapid shifting of weather conditions. And so, more discussion… and this time, we’d dice for a weather change only after all the cards in the deck had been drawn. Even so, the weather changes seemed pretty drastic to me, but whatta I know about life on the ocean blue?
In all, the procedures flowed and the game went rapidly, despite the fact that a lot of the mechanics were about to be changed in the forthcoming second edition.
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© Copyright 2002 Wally Simon
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