For several years my ancient fleets have been sitting quietly in their tins, hoping something might happen to renew my interest in them. Finally I have stirred myself to make up a gridded board to move them on and have been drafting some rules to test out.
The board is in four panels for ease of transport for club games. I found the patterned blue paper in a local stationers and after drawing the grid have mounted it on foam panels and given it a trim around the outside. If it needs to be enlarged, more panels can be added, but it looks big enough for the fleets I can field at the moment.
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| The panels laid out to give a 34 by 24 square grid on which the octagonal ship bases can be moved with ease. |
All the bases I have ready at the moment hold multiple ship models, except for the few deceres which are too large for more than one model to fit onto a 45mm width base. I don't have enough for all the ships. The picture above shows the majority of the fighting ships available, as well as the wreckage markers. There are enough small vessels - Pentekonters and Dieres - to make up another dozen bases if I had them, as well as 10 or 12 Roman Quinquiremes and about 20 assorted transport ships. All of the ships are from Tumbling Dice's 1:2400 naval range.
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| Main battle line for one fleet, heavier ships to the fore, mainly trieres behind. |
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| A flanking squadron of lighter ships, with wreckage markers in front. Wreckage can become an obstacle to navigation as an engagement wears on. |
The individual models are not glued to the bases but attached with magnetic material. For smaller scale actions where one model can represent one ship I intend to make some individual bases to which models can be transferred. The individual bases will still be octagons 45mm in width as I will keep the same movement system as for larger battles.
What I hope to do with the rules is to distil the individual qualities of each ship - how good the helmsman, crew and hull are, what is its size, how many marines are carried, does it have any special weapons or structure? - into a few factors that make it easier to manage a large scale battle whether fought solo or with friends. I think I will end up with two action factors - agility, being a measure of how likely a base of ships is going to succeed in attacks or evasions, and exertion, a quota of points to use to make attacks, evasions or fast moves. There will then be a tally of ship damage and marine losses. That's the general idea, but it remains work in progress. A trial game or two to see how the initial draft works in practice is the next step.
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| Waiting for rules to be readied and an opponent to step forward |
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