Voyaging

[Dobbs]

Here’s an experiment I’ve been working on.

A sailing voyage has been described as days of boredom interspersed with flashes of intense excitement. My aim is to reproduce that feeling, only condensed and made to entertain.

The following is a 2 week voyage of the USS Saratoga, to harass enemy shipping. Beforehand, I made up a list of five potential encounters. These would be unknown to the player on the voyage. The weather cards reflect the weather on a given day. The Spyglass cards reflect what the lookouts see. In this case, there are 14 Empty Sea cards and 5 Sail Ho! cards.



The first day is uneventful, with extremely light winds and an empty sea.



The second day brings heavy air, but again the sea remains empty. In this interpretation, the wind range in the basic game is Light/Fair/Heavy. I have expanded the wind range from flat calms to storms.



Day 3 brings fair winds, but no encounters.



On the 4th day, under fair winds on the morning watch, the lookout spies something. Unfortunately, it is never ascertained what it was since the spotting range for the Saratoga was less than the stranger’s.



Three uneventful days pass with fair and light winds, but the eighth day brings a storm. Saratoga comes through unscathed.



Sailing in extremely light breeze during the morning watch the day after the storm, a ship is spotted hull up on the horizon. They never stand a chance. Knocked about a bit by the storm, they don’t spot Saratoga until she’s within a cable of them. The British merchantman Tessa yields without a fight (Burden 1, low value cargo).



Another vessel is spotted on the 10th day with a fair wind in the forenoon watch. The lookout spies her hull down, but nothing is learned before I am called to dinner and the game gets put away.



My goal with this is to develop a game/introduction to SoG that will expand from the basic shoot’em up game and cover the feeling of voyaging and encountering an unknown on the open ocean. This is just an overview of how the day to day is handled. Not pictured here are my rules for chasing an opponent. Historically, it seems there was a lot of time spent chasing before ships got down to the maneuvering and firing. Sometimes it could go on for days! My thought is that SoG covers the close-in fighting, where sail handling was reduced to the minimum and the focus was on maneuvering. I’m trying to come up with the part before the ships end up on the table and an exit, other than sailing off the edge.


The idea is to remind players that there are days when nothing of interest occurs, yet from a play point of view to share this quickly. Had the last encounter not been interrupted by dinner, it would have moved to my chase board and a few minutes later to the tactical (regular SoG) board if it was a worthy opponent.