Sails of Glory

 There were two main things stopping me from buying "Sails of Glory":

1. My natural suspicion of all "pre-painted" miniatures and

2. My Scroogelike reaction of "I'm not paying that much for a few bits of card and plastic!"

The impulse to get past these was a day in prospect where our small group would be trying a number of shorter and skirmish type games, in which Sails of Glory would fit right in, I hoped. For anyone not familiar with the game it is a naval wargames set in the Napoleonic period (others to follow I'm sure. )  The reports of the gameplay sounded to be in a similar vein to the Wings of Glory air combat game that I have enjoyed the few times I played it.

The game arrived in time for the day and contained everything that would be needed  to start playing straight out of the box. There were 4 plastic ship model, 2 ship of the line and two frigates, rules ship displays and a plethora of counters in good sturdy card. Naturally I flicked through the rules once I had checked out what was included in the box. Seemed pretty straightforward to me; I liked the pattern of splitting the rules into a basic set, to get used to the general concepts and Advanced Rules when a bit more sophistication is required.  We would be sticking with the Basic rules as far as I was concerned!

The gameplay was quite simple, we picked it up as we went along, and there were not that many occasions that we needed to check the rules once we had tried out a particular circumstance. Our first part of the system that we needed to become proficient at was how to deal with being in the wrong direction compared to the wind. The main challenge of the game is to be able to sail your warship to a position where you an attack the enemy. On turn 1 our own wargames Hornblower - Nick, immediately put his frigate straight into the wind and spent the next 2 turns sorting himself out!

This gave me the time I needed to launch a daring / reckless attack on the British Ship of the Line in my French frigate and I just about got away intact having peppered  him ineffectually with my tiny tiny cannons!  I ran away in the direction of Nick's British frigate, deciding he looked more like my size... Nick/Hornblower responded to my attack by ramming his ship into mine five times in an attempt to board. Eventually he was successful and the damage my little crew had taken tangling with the English ship of the line meant he swept all before him and captured himself a prize.

Nick next went in pursuit of the two larger three-deckers which had been zig-zagging across the ocean trading salvos when they got the chance.  Nick charged his frigate up behind Jim's ship model, only to be informed that this was his fellow Royal Navy vessel! (Proper fog of war supplied gratis by the players!)  Once Nick had moved across to attack the French this time he discovered again the lesson from earlier in the game, a frigate is a relatively fragile thing and can be easily sunk by a ship of the line's broadside. And it was.  The two remaining ships hammered away at each other and it was a close run thing. HMS Vanguard was forced to grapple the Frenchman to avoid being sunk by gunfire (I like to think my frigate's earlier contribution made the difference here!)  In a very hard-fought boarding action, the French ship just survived by the skin of its teeth and manged to capture Vanguard once her crew were too depleted to carry on.

A fun game even with our novice level appreciation of the rules.  The different damage types being decided by drawing from different coloured pools of counters worked well. The one item that was not included in the gamebox was containers to draw the counters from but we improvised with what we had to hand. Luckily for me my wife is a crafter and amongst the items she created are small drawstring bags. I now find myself the proud owner of five bags, colour-coded to match the counter sets.

I am sure we will play this game again and I am already thinking about ways to adapt it to other periods of naval warfare...