Brian Dewitt appeared with a little box full of 1-inch-long triremes. He had purchased the teeny-tiny ships at the last HMGS convention, COLD WARS, in March, and hadn't touched them since. There were triremes and biremes and quinqueremes and so on, all in 6mm scale. He used an interesting impulse movement system, which he modestly said he had appropriated from someone else. There were 5 phases per bound, and on each phase, ships (which had been assigned a specific speed factor beforehand) moved according to a chart which resembled the following: Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4 Phase 5 7 7 7 7 7 6 6 - 6 6 - 5 5 5 - - 4 - 4 - The numbers denote the speed factor of the ship. On each phase, if the factor is given in the phase column, then the ship moves 2 inches. Thus on Phase 3, a ship with a factor of 7 will move 2 inches and so will a ship with a factor of 5. Note that ships with factors of 7 will move on all phases, going a total of 10 inches during the entire bound. In contrast, a ship with a speed factor of 4 will only move twice during the bound, on Phase 2 and Phase 4. After a ship moved its 2 inches when its phase appeared, it could turn 45 degrees. It couldn't do this for 2 phases in a row, however. Ships had marines and archers aboard, and these had to be tracked. Another factor was termed 'endurance', and I didn't fully understand its significance except that it was reduced when your ship was rammed. Perhaps it was another type of 'hull box'. Perhaps not. There was ramming and grappling and un-grappling and boarding and, most exciting of all, there was the dreaded "oar confusion". If your oars got confused, you were in deep trouble. According to Brian, your oars just couldn't hack it when the rowers fell out of synch and simply flailed away at the water. One ship, after being sideswiped, came down with what seemed to be a terminal case of "oar confusion" and almost sailed off into the horizon in a straight line. But the question arose... if the oarsmen were so confused, wouldn't the ship have made a bunch of aimless circles instead of going off in a straight line? The rules were changed on the spot, faster than you could say "oar confusion": I mentioned that a ship could turn 45 degrees after it had made its 2-inch move. It could also attempt a "radical maneuver", turning more than 45 degrees, but the penalty was that if you failed the "radical maneuver" test, off you went in "oar confusion". It took a brave sea captain to attempt to perform a "radical maneuver". And then we come to ramming. In past articles on ship games and ramming maneuvers, I have noted that everyone tableside is chock full of ramming tidbits and ramming advice and ramming technological specifications and knows exactly what happens when a big hole opens up in your ship and the water pours in. It turned out that Jeff Wiltrout was our in-house ramming expert (he had taken Ramming 101, a graduate course), and so, in the end, despite each of us at table-side being a professed expert on the subject, we all deferred to him. And so the ramming question was settled, and the next topic was "un-ramming"... having smashed through a ship and with 10 feet of your own prow stuck in the side of the enemy's craft, and with the results table stating that the enemy ship was going down like a rock, how do you "un-ram", i.e.,., withdraw your ship so as not to be sucked under with the doomed vessel. Not to worry. Once again it was Jeff Wiltrout to the rescue. The lad was a veritable font of knowledge on this topic, too... in fact, he appeared to know as much about un-ramming as he did about ramming. The grappling rules also underwent a detailed investigation... who grapples who... when can you grapple... when can you un-grapple... I can tell you that Brian took home a pot-full of information, more than he probably wanted. More Awash Introduction Greek Naval Warfare Modern Gulf War Napoleonic Skirmishing World War II The English Civil War Back to PW Review June 1999 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 Wally Simon This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com