Scrib's game sounds inticing. I'll have to check it out.

The "Wings of War" at Sea idea sounds very promising. I like that idea a great deal.

The old 3M or Avalon Hill version of Regatta might also be a good starting point for a quick-play, ship vs. ship or squadron vs. squadron game.

A while back, I inquired about tacking a large, ship-of-the-line-size vessel. From the accounts and links I found, it seemed like it would only take a 2-3 minutes to tack a SOL with a lively, experienced crew. This seems to be reflected reasonably well in the turn-scale of WS&IM.

After that, you might have to consider if playing an RPG or skirmish game set at sea, such as (Warhammer Historical's) Legends of the High Seas might be better suited to what you're trying to recreate.

I too think a "cinematic" age of sail game would be great. Especially if it could be card based. I love Man O' War (which I'm surprised nobody has mentioned yet) but it's rather unwieldy when you want to go down to the pub and play a game wherein you blow some stuff up over pints.

Gratified to see some interest, and after reading through the posts I'd add:

I really was thinking about a game that simulates novels/movies, not real history. Sag makes good points, but that is exactly what I'm trying to stay away from, the tedium of reality.

Whoever it was that said that reacting to situational changes brought about by damage could add spice is right on the mark. I'd go so far as to say that there should be damage AND casualty effects, with key personel on the ships...yes, closer to role playing but that's what Hornblower and Aubrey are all about. I'd even give points to the player who has the officer of Marines who dies in the goriest fashion .

I like the WOW card driven manuever ideas!

I'd just like to add that I'm actually pretty fed up with pirates and I've never liked them as themes for games...
It doesn't sound as if you'd be going that direction but the P word has been mentioned and we are talking about ships.

You know what to do.

How about having different decks like in Twilight Struggle? So, let's say that one of your "situational changes" occurs. As soon as it does you either add in the next batch of cards or keep it seperate but it opens up for drawing from. First deck can be recycled but later decks can't... But they have really cool stuff born of extreme heroism / desparation / cinematic coolness.

Maybe the decks could be communal... Maybe they would be available only to one player. Individual ships? No... Too cumbersome by far.

Anyway, hope that idea helps some.

I'm thinking different decks like in Blue Moon (or Combat Commander: Europe?), with nationality-specific decks (English, French, Spanish, etc.) reflecting historical differences in seamanship, tactical doctrine, likelihood to eat cheese and surrender, etc.

Ah, I've not played those games. It sounds like that type of system would be more like what I was trying to convey.

My first response after playing Wings of War was it would have made a better Age of Sail game. No worries though, I am using the WOW miniatures to play Too Fat Lardies rules for WW1 air combat "Algernon Pulls It Off".

Which brings me to my recommendation...
Take a look at Too Fat Lardies rules for Age of Sail "Kiss Me Hardy", already recommended once in this very thread.

    In one of my earlier posts I indicated that compromising the nature of the ships would indeed make for a more interesting game, and is likely the best direction. To some extent these games exist in other guises, such as Star Fleet Battles, where point of wind is non-existent. If you move up to the mid 1800s you get steam power (on sailing ships mind you -- both power sources available in one hull) that lessened the wind's effect on the battle but did not eliminate it. This can result in maneuver cards that have a nice balance depending on wind direction. I'm thinking color-coded lines on the cards for maneuver, with matching color-coded edges on the card. Lay the card in front of the ship, determine where on the edge of the card the wind strikes it, and then use that color to determine which line moves the ship. A bit more complicated than Wings of War, but not out of the question.

    The ships prior to that needed to be powerful, big guns, tall decks, big range. Sailing capability was generally compromised to near oblivion for this, and if you like you can move down to smaller ships and smaller battles to give yourself some flexibility. But I think the real entertainment may come from role-playing or even the shipboard combat from boarding parties. That solution steps away from the sailing aspect though. Throw a little cyberpunk in for additional ship locomotion and you may get a nice mix.

    Or just take the wind virtually out of the picture. Pretend the ships have near-zero friction and have them earn speed points going down and spend them going up.


    Ok, back off subject again. On tacking a big ship of the day, from The First Salute --



    Tuchman is quoting an Admiral Morrison. I do not know who he is (was).

    I've tacked a thousand times in boats as big as fifty feet -- boats especially designed to go fast upwind and be very maneuverable. You lose speed in tacks. You lose a LOT of speed in tacks, even when you really nail them. Generally the helmsman will steer off the wind to regenerate that lift for a period of time. The ships in Hornblower's day were vastly more complicated and cumbersome. The directions above specifically describe back-winding the heads, which dumps forward motion to earn angular motion. In short, they stomped on the brakes to make the boat turn. These ships could not consider tacking in battle because if they lost headway they could no longer change heading (rudders don't work on a stationary ship) and an enemy passing in front of or behind them would tear them to bits.

    More often the battle was in jockeying for position, with one ship toying the other while "above her" in the wind. If the leeward ship got pressed against the shore or shallow water the Captain had the choice of going broadsides with her, or surrendering. Indeed that jockeying may be the better aspect of a game based in reality. Race the Wind does something similar for match racing -- maybe it would be a good starting point for shooting.

             Sag.

To cite one example in recent cinema of how storytellers and filmmakers try to make sea battles more interesting, look at the climactic battle in Pirates of the Carribean 3 (which, by then, they were not really 'of the Carribean' anymore, but I digress...). With the Black Pearl and that ship Turner got from Davey Jones in PERFECT RAKE POSITION, able to continue sailing straight ahead and deal an absolutely devastating pair of bow rakes on the East India flagship...The filmmakers instead opt for a completely illogical battle where the two sail to either side, both exposing themselves to broadsides for no reason (other than they read the script and knew their enemy would not return fire!?!), and actually risking hitting each other if shot went high! This is the sort of nonsense we have to get past, in the public eye, before an interesting and even remotely accurate age of sail wargame simpler than WS&IM could be designed...

Throughout history, naval battles have pretty much involved both sides hammering away at each other using the pinnacle of whatever technology was available at the time--usually, as often previously mentioned, for hours upon hours, generally with an indecisive result (other than for the men killed and maimed, of course...). Even where there were spectacular victories, they generally owed much to lucky hits (HMS Hood at North Cape), horrendous design errors (HMS Suffolk in the Falklands), or were decisive mostly because the morale of the losing ships was completely shot (at Trafalgar, most of the French/Spanish ships were actually unharmed because the French van Admiral decided to simply keep on sailing away from the battle with more than half the fleet, rather than risk turning back and suffering a few bow rakes to reenter the battle).

The interesting parts of naval combat are really the days of maneuver which precede the battle (the movie Master and Commander--Far Side of the World actually addressed this aspect reasonably well). Though not of the age of sail, there are games which simulate this aspect very well, Bismarck and Flat Top are two of my favourites. But, where maneuver is the focus of a game, this generally means a long game! (In fact, to speed play, WS&IM not only chose scenarios which were reasonably balanced, but altered history where necessary to create conditions where ships will almost inevitably close range--which, in fact, is the main problem with this game besides the inability to tack properly to close more advantageously: The scale is such that once within reasonable gun range, it is nearly impossible to not grapple and have boarding actions, much more than is historically resonable!)

Still, there may be something there if the pre-battle maneuvering aspect could make up the bulk of the game. Though ships did recover and win after suffering bow rakes, normally this was crippling enough to decide the battle. And John Paul Jones aside, most captains and crews were not willing to fight until their ship sunk--if the battle started to go against them, they would withdraw, and if they could not withdraw, they would surrender. (In fact, in one of the Hornblower stories, Captain Pelgrew is quite critical of a fellow Royal Navy Captain who forces a merchant ship on which he is embarked to fight to sinking--denying the supplies to the Spanish, but killing most of the crew in the process. It was a much more gentlemanly era, in many ways.)

I must admit have the vague impression that tacking, while complex and having such problems as loosing headway and risking getting "caught in irons", was not quite as long an operation as you may think. Mind you, any extra amount of time is a long time when under fire, I imagine.

Admittedly I culled this next quote from that bastion of fact checking, the Internet - but hey, so's your post, so perhaps it starts out as even. Someone was asserting a similar position as an error in the Master and Commander move (that it would have taken a long time to tack, perhaps 30 minutes). The response to that was thus:


Assuming the person is indeed speaking with first hand knowledge (and also presuming he's talking about just under windpower), it jibes more with what I have read. On the other hand, I myself have never done any sailing outside of an armchair, so I must trust in the reports of others. Oh, and it's a frigate, not a ship of the line.

I'll query into a nautical fiction list I'm on, where there are some researchers and others who may have a good idea!

All this talk about tacking time and such sounds like a lot of sea-lawyering...I say bring on the movie physics!

How about letting a player spend "élan" points to add oomph to an attack or speed to a maneuver, to simulate the legendary captain using his mojo to overcome great odds?

Let the player purchase key crewmembers - a doctor to negate casualties or make "saving rolls" on other key crew, a sailing master to add maneuvers, an inspiring midshipman to rally crew. Get twisted and let the players purchase incompetents for the other side..."Drunken Doctor performs amputation on wrong patient, lose random midshipman" or "Agitating sailor advocates social reforms; lose one morale level for two turns unless cancelled by play of 'A dozen at the Gratings'" Perhaps you do this with card driven combat - Use the idea of fire cards usable by X rating and below like in Enemy in Sight and modify the range of results with card play.

Keep it fast and loose with tounge in cheek and come up with ways to insert AOS cliches in the game.

Hmmm...the 'Wings of War' idea is pretty good. And you could EASILY work wind into this, too. Each card has two lines - one if the arrow direction is pointing closer to the direction of wind, the other if away.

For instance (forgive crudeness, but):



...as a 'turn to port' card. If the direction of travel is into the wind, you use the blue line; if WITH the wind, use the red line.

    Presumably you mean to reverse the two.

             Sag.

Picture a game with one sloop-or frigate-type ship per player, beginning as a two-player but expandable with more sets.

Each ship is represented by a counter on a maneuver map with eight possible directions of movement.

Movement is simultaneous, plotted by choosing cards for movement, turns, luffing, etc. The rate of movement is influenced by whether a Captain chooses full sail (courses set) or battle sail (courses furled), and the vessel's course relative to wind direction (which can shift during a battle).

Each ship is also represented by a deck plan with space for individual cannon, masts, crew members, Marines, and a Captain.

Guns are fired with one die representing each gun's shot. Crews are needed to reload guns. A Captain may target the enemy's Hull, resulting in hull hits, dismounted guns, or crew casualties, or the enemy's Rigging, resulting in mast damage/dismasting.

Hull hits result in progressive rises in water in the hold, which eventually affects the vessel's speed. Eventually, hull hits will sink the vessel. Mast damage also affects vessel speed, requiring that one of the three cards chosen for each Movement Phase be a "no movement" card.

Ships can be raked, can fire at partial broadside on an off-bow or off-quarter target, or shoot full broadsides when the guns bear.

The system also permits Players to easily graft on rules, such as assigning crew members to the pumps.

If ships end a movement impulse in the same location, they have run afoul of each other--and a boarding action ensues. Crew members, the Captain, and the Marines can be used to board the enemy and/or defend their ship, and hand-to-hand combat ensues until a ship is taken by the enemy.

With additional components, more ships can be represented, and larger or smaller ships can be devised from the basic premise.

I'm not describing an imaginary design; this was the original Larry Harris/Nova Designs edition of what became Milton Bradley's "Broadsides & Boarding Parties."

This design begs for re-release. MB made the mistake of setting the game in the "pirate" era rather than the Revolutionary/Napoleonic era, making the ships unnecessarily high and cumbersome with the slippery pitched decks players of the MB version remember. MB also "dumbed down" the rules, removed the Marines, reduced the number of guns, and eliminated the sail-set options and wind direction (AAUGHHH).

I'd love to see some publisher do it right.

No, I think that's right.

This is a 'turn to port' card. If the wind is coming FROM port, you use the blue line - it's more difficult to turn into that wind. If the wind is coming from starboard (the opposite direction from the turn), you use the red line - much easier to turn WITH the wind.

    Got it. I read "direction of travel" to mean the starting direction, not the ending.

    This isn't going to work effectively unless you have a separate deck of cards for each wind angle. What I was thinking instead was a card with perhaps eight lines on it, each showing a varying degree of bend and length, each a different color. These would represent the ship's movement similar to what your card shows. Add this detail -- around the edge of the card would be matching colors, each covering a different part of the card's border. Whichever part of the card the wind is coming across dictates which color you use. That is, lay the card down in front of the ship, figure out which part of the edge of the card the wind strikes first, and then use the line of that color for movement.

    That way you could use the same set of cards regardless of your heading, and each would adjust itself automatically to the current conditions. What would result would be a small enough set of cards to manage effectively, similar in number to Wings of War. Round cards would be the most effective but you could make them rectangular or hex, or octagonal.

             Sag.

Something like this, for a sloop rigged ship moving straight:



I think you'd probably want to move bow to bow, rather than bow to stern (as Wing of War does it), otherwise even in irons a ship is going to make a lot of forward progress.

Bow-to-stern is easiest in moving cards. And, in any case, taking a page from WoW's "steep" maneuvers, you can put the 'end' marker right near the beginning - meaning the ship only really moves a single ship length. That's not so bad, really.

    That is indeed what I was considering. I was going to draw it on a napkin and scan it in.

    If a ship needs to move a short distance or even backwards you can just move the starting point to the middle of the card. But moving bow-to-bow would take the size of the ship out of the equation. May or may not be an issue.

    My concern is that, even with this simple ruleset for movement, the game may degrade down to broadsides, as it may be a big disadvantage to attempt to maneuver around a ship that has you in its sights or could get you there in short order with a turn of the rudder. This may be the reason that, in the words of the original poster, wargame designers intentionally "missed the mythical Age of Sail boat." One way to find out.

             Sag.

There's always Evil Stevie's Pirate Game. I know some people are sick of Pirates, but it does look like a fun game. It doesn't have to be played with Pirates, or even Lego's for that matter.

I was kicking around the idea of using Pirates of the Spanish Main ships and then for boarding actions use actual deck plans for each ship that you could move around mini's, counters, whatever. You'd probably lose some of the visceral fun of sailig a Lego ship around on the floor with crew falling off into the ocean and everything, but it would be much more practical for space-challenged gaming.

I hate to be the blower of my own horn but do check out the chit draw system in my rule set.

In essence, each nationality has at least 4 chits in the same draw cup

1 Fire Chit that enables that player fire one broadside per ship.
1 Normal Movement chit that enables that player to move any and all ships based on attitude toward the wind
1 Specially Marked movement chit enables that player to move any and all ships with < than 50% rigging damage based on attitude toward the wind normally. Ships with > than 50% rigging damage may not move when this chit is drawn.

1 (or more) Command chits, including Legendary Captain and/or Admiral chits that permit 1 or several ships to take bonus actions.

In the optional rules, a weather event chit or fortress gunners fire chit may be added to the cup.


I had played the PC game AoS I and AoS II many times. The tension in those games was hoping that your ship could reload or turn before the enemy.

Through the chit activation each player has a guarantee of moving twice and firing once plus a wild card of sorts but not knowing in which order those impulses will be drawn. It is possible through a fortuitous draw sequence to out manuever the enemy. Furthermore, does one gamble and expose the ship to a rake hoping you'll draw your next movement chit before the enemy draws his fire chit.

The down side is, it takes a hex grid and a fairly large one but when using PoSM ships. When adjusted to play on a large hex mat using d10s or d12s, it scales right into WS&IM at 100 yards per hex and six minutes (IIRC) per turn.

Anyway, my friend Richard has been after me to formally publish the final version.

Capt. Percy Idlemind

If you read this far you might be interested in the first of the audio books I recorded. It's free, it's a book written by Nelson's doc' on the Victory.

The Death of Lord Nelson

Man O' War does all this, in spades.

Well... Yes and no.
I did mention that up above if you'd notice. But the main point (I believe) is to get a game, yes like Man O' War, but without all the fiddly bits. One that can be taught easily, doesn't require an investment in minis, is easily portable and plays relatively quickly.

Man O War is tons of fun and all but you need a big table to play on and you have the fudgey movement that comes with using a ruler and then there's all the little chits and counters and big stat cards and ... Oh, did I mention that this is a miniatures game? Yeah, there's that. You've got to have those too don't you?

Now, let's say I'm in the mood for some cannonball flinging fun on the high seas with my mates down at the pub. Problem is I'm the only one that's ever heard of Games Workshop among them. Don't even get started on asking if they know of the game MoW.



So, you see what the problem is.
Yes, the above addresses my own personal wants and needs but then I never said I was in this discussion to help make a game I wouldn't want to play. If I can steer it in a direction of my choosing in even a small way I will do so.