Rule test: Trim those sails

Having had my naval warfare appetite wetted by a series of books ostensibly about land warfare, I now had to hand a simple ruleset for naval wars.

Table Top Battles (TTB) is a compendium that include several rulesets, one of which is about naval warfare. The rules are clear – they are not an exercise in sailing simulation: I think they are a landlubbers abstraction. That does not sound complimentary. They are simple, quick, fun and to this landlubber just what I needed to play out some of the small actions I have been reading about.

I used the rules out of the book unaltered and found they were quick and easy to apply giving swift results. The original squadrons arriving in a line (two lines for the blue squadron) soon broke into small groups contesting their survival one to one and occasionally two to one. It felt right.

The movement is unlimited so ships can stop, go maximum or any distance in between if they have sufficient sail intact. Each ship had 3 sails = 3 spaces maximum movement. The ships could turn in a square with each 90 degree turn taken. This level of abstraction might feel like bumper cars. However the question is “is detailing carefully turning as a process – useful?” Whereas rules that focus on outcomes tend to the abstract.

Each ship is given armanent in the shape of a broadside on each side of the ship. The broadside can only fire at ninety degrees to the ships keel line. The crew represent other close action capability. This has limited range and impact yet 360 degrees of direction irrespective of which crew element is left in operation.

The final component is the command. This provides additional support to the combat elements of crew and broadside.

All 4 element types – sail/broadside/command and crew can be destroyed and that is the sole objective of the game. In this way you knock ships out of action.

The winning side is the one having the most ships with both some sail and broadside capability.

With 5 versus 4 ships, all identical, the advantage was signficiant and the result was all the smaller sides ships were defeated. You don’t get draws, I suspect, if fighting to the last ship. So any game should be time bound or have limited victory conditions.

As a basic quick maritime wargame it works. This landlubber is happy.

The rules are available online or in print here. http://www.gridwargaming.co.uk/p/table-top-battles-2nd-edition.html

They retail at 14 GBP – remember though, you get multi era rules for land, sea, air, fantasy, sieges and campaigns. The naval ruleset also covers ship to shore battles which I have yet to look at.

weigh anchor and set sail……….