Sails of Glory at Rapier Con 2015

[Chiron0224]

The game was a success and here are the pics I took of it in action.

http://imgur.com/a/z6mXi

My only regret is that the first turn maneuver by my friend Ethan effectively took one of the enemy ships out of the fight and made the situation hopeless for the French. I fear that they didn't enjoy the game as much as they could have considering.

But hey, that's war

[Nightmoss]

Thanks for the photos and AAR, David. The French do look a bit downhearted.

[7eat51]

Nice set of pictures, David.

Did the French players say anything about the game afterwards?

[Bligh]

Very nice set of pictures and comments Dave.
You certainly out maneuvered and outgunned the French.
Thanks for the overview.
Rob.

[Loki 13]

nice pictures .

[Chiron0224]

The French player who got left in the dust was a little bummed and the kid who lost a ship wasn't super excited but he had a good attitude. He had actually played the game plenty of times with his Dad. I did a couple of things to make it not quite so terrible for the French guy though cause I started to feel bad. One thing is I was using a "rolling table" for my game (basically, if the ships got close to the edge I moved them all exactly one ruler distance away from it again. It's sort of like panning the view over to follow the ships rather than having a hard edge to the battle field). When it came time to "roll" the table and slide all the ships down I left his ship where it was so it gained an entire ruler's length on catching up to the battle. The other thing is that he turned to bear up and was exactly one ruler distance from one of the British ships and was very disheartened that he had spent basically the whole game trying to close and then turned and couldn't get a shot. Feeling bad for him I told him that I would rule that the two ships were in range of each other. So he could shoot if the Brit could shoot. That was agreeable to all players who really were starting to see how he got the short end this game and so he and the Brit got to shoot each other.

[7eat51]

Well played, David.

I let players who are defeated to respawn. Basically, if there is more than 15 minutes left, they come back in after two maneuvers, and I point to where they will come in, informing everyone before the two maneuvers are played. No one has ever complained, at least publicly . Some folks plan to intercept the newcomer; some folks who are out of the main battle find themselves engaged again; sometimes, the result of the game is altered with the respawn. I have found that if people are enjoying themselves, they are glad to see a fellow player enter even if it means their own defeat. Of course they would like to have won, but in the end, the two or three hours were enjoyed, and that, I believe, is what most, if not all, remember.

A caveat, though, is in order. I do not run reenactments for historically-minded wargamers. If I were to run such a game, I would probably have players run multiple ships, or some such thing, to keep everyone engaged. Respawning in such a game would not make sense.

[Chiron0224]

I was in a historical scenario recently involving ironclads and we had respawning ships but only because historically our side had a ton of those guys waiting to come in and join the battle so that 2 ships represented a vast number of ships. These were timber clads and our ironclads did not respawn.