I recently invited some of my gamer friends who are really into the age of sail, to give Sails of Glory a go next saturday. Some other friends of mine heard of that, and have decided they'd love to take part too.

Therefore, I will be playing Sails of Glory with 5 other people next week. That's great! We play with advanced rules and some optional ones too (flagships being one of these).

There is a problem, however: I only have the starter set at hand, and we are six players in total. I know they won't agree to split the group, and while I have already ordered two more third rates, due to the time of the year they won't be avaliable until long after saturday. That makes 4 ships to command for 6 captains.

I was thinking about trying to run a variation of the Algeciras scenario for the 2014 scenario contest, since it includes at least one printable town as a coastal battery I could print and play as, therefore freeing one more ship for other players to use.
I was wondering, however, since we are talking three people and two ships in each side, maybe having the player without ships to command being an "admiral" in the flagship (while the ship itself is under command of its respective captain) could work.

Do you have any idea about how to implement this concept? Is there a system we could use to make "admirals" have to take hard and fun decisions without diminishing the captain's enjoyment? Do you have any other ideas or suggestions?

Thanks a lot for your imput.