All at Sea - Generic French 3rd Rates in Revolutionary War Trim

 

After adding six generic British 3rd rates to the collection just before Christmas, I set about doing six generic French 3rd rates which would have been completed last month but for my decision to get some models out on the table to do the Leeward Line scenario and the Scourge versus Le Sans Culottes game.

Not the greatest of years ended on a high for me, managing to get my six additional British generic third rates finished, and taking a big chunk out of the models left yet to be built and keen to get started on the French in 2021
http://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2020/12/happy-christmas-2020-what-interesting.html

These reinforcements for the Combined fleet move the Trafalgar build project into its final stage with just eleven more models needed to be added to complete the sixty odd models needed for the project.

It is very satisfying working through several of these models in one go and I have now developed a settled production line method of constructing, painting and rigging these kits to get a batch of six models completed in about three weeks.

Generic 74's Pair One

Given that my preceding French models have been done in regular chequer-board paint schemes I decided that my next group of generic models should add a bit of variety to my French squadrons by including models completed with a more Revolutionary look to them, forgoing the dark black-grey strake along the centreline of the lower and upper gun decks with a yellow-ochre look instead together with similarly painted gun-ports to give them that distinctive broad strake of the earlier period ships.

Jacques-Noel Sane, chief French ship designer of the era

In addition I decided to have them look like a variation on a theme, which the Sane led designs of French ships no doubt encouraged and so I used the same stern galleries on the models and simply varied the figureheads and the colours (gold and white-ivory) of them to give that variation effect, together with slightly different colour trims (red, gold and white) to the galleries as well.

Generic 74's Pair Two

The French 74-gun Mont-Blanc and other ships off Marseilles 1803 - Ange-Joseph Antoine Roux
The typically French rounded stern galleries are well illustrated in Roux's picture and caused me to choose the most rounded version supplied in the Warlord box set.

Generic 74's Pair Three

Admiral Villeneuve had fourteen French 74-gun and four 80-gun third rates at Trafalgar and with all the 80-gunners complete and now twelve 74's alongside them I just have two more 74's to do.

In the next All at Sea post, I'll review what's left to complete the ship build part of the project and some of the other thoughts I have about the collection as a whole and the game I would like to recreate which follows on from some of the considerations discussed in my previous post looking at rule sets; then I will post the first pictures of the first fleet to get finished which will be Villeneuve's Combined Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three ships of the line, five frigates and two brigs.

Next up, Steve and I have been battling away in the Ardennes forests and hills for the last four weeks and much fun has been had with Vassal hosting GMT's Ardennes 44.

All at Sea - The Search for the One Rule to Rule them All!

Some of the many rules for Age of Sail gaming that grace my library

 

With the work to complete the Trafalgar collection of 1:700th ships nearing completion, and I'm looking forward to showing the next six French 3rd Rates to join the collection later this week, together with an update on the remaining models needed to be built, I have been turning my attention back to rules and the kind of game I would like to run.

If you have been in the hobby for a certain length of time, you will inevitably see the coming and going of different rules that capture the imagination only to subside into use by a loyal cohort as the next set hove's into view to steal the limelight with new ideas and ways to do what other sets have done but in a slightly different way with a slightly different emphasis on a particular aspect of the warfare at sea of this period.

The search began in 2020 for a set of rules to compliment the scale of models I wanted to use

If you get into a period, then like me you will also inevitably end up with quite a collection of rules as the header to the post illustrates, showing rules I have in my collection, not to mention the boardgame collection that has much to offer the table top player, with a close affinity between the two groups of players as illustrated by the many games of Wooden Ships & Iron Men played using models on a hex mat.

I am always interested to see a newcomer to the hobby posting on a forum that very familiar question, 'What rules do people recommend I should use to start playing ..........? Then just complete the sentence with any period you care to think of.

When I look at my large collection, I suppose I'm not that surprised that a newcomer might find the whole aspect of choosing a rule set rather overwhelming, and I guess that when I started out in the hobby in the mid seventies, the process was a lot more straight forward as there weren't that many rules to choose from and here in the UK with the wargame club scene, you ended up playing what everyone else decided on in your club, particularly when there were players there that had been doing it a lot longer than you and knew the good sets or rules from the not so good sets.

The rules needed to be able to cope with large actions and the smaller single ship affairs

Of course in the absence of the internet, information was a lot harder to come by and thus certain rules became the 'gold-standard' for playing a particular period or theme and with the difficulty researching the information that underpinned the assumptions the rules made one often ended up accepting the picture of battle the games they offered created.

However today, with information only stroke away on the keyboard, there really is no excuse for not putting in a bit of effort to find out about the ways a particular period was fought and then comparing that information with the way the rules you are looking at model them and then consider do they do it in a fun and entertaining way with plenty of decision points that the command level you are playing would have faced.

The Leeward Line scenario using War By Sail (adapted) helped to firm up the look and type of game I am planning, post-lockdown

Thus in a roundabout way I come to the crux of the process I am working on now to identify the key aspects I want to include on the table for the particular encounters I want to recreate, be they the big-battle scenario such as the Trafalgar game I am contemplating to the smaller single-ship encounters that pose quite a different set of challenges and to find rules capable of producing both types of games  hopefully with little adaptation to accommodate both.

As with the Talavera project that took a longer period to build, some four years in fact, I want a game that creates the granularity that allows the drama of the action to be captured as covered in the accounts of the historical battle and a comparison with the historical decision points to those made by the players on the table and thus the rules have to have enough detail in them to allow that and be pitched at the decision point level of the commanders in the game, that is an Admiral or Squadron Commodore in the big-game scenario and the Captain in the ship v ship game.

So the process started last year with the first few games pre-pandemic that used War by Sail which have a really nice level of detail at the gunnery level whilst pitching the player into the command seat perfectly at the level of the fleet/squadron commander, giving a very clean game that moves along at a good pace and work well in a solo format as demonstrated in the Leeward Line game I produced last month.

That said I have wondered if I can get a greater level of 'granularity' into the game, all be it at the expense of taking a bit longer to reach a conclusion, without losing the nice flowing game that War by Sail produces, something that would benefit the playing of small ship actions.

Small actions come in all shapes and sizes and the rules need to cope below the rate

There is where the choice of rules meets some interesting challenges, and something I chatted through with the chaps at the DWG on a recent Zoom gathering in that it has struck me that some of the rules I have looked at seem a little uncertain as to the level of command they want the player/s to play at. For example in one set I am messing around with, the game they create is designed to allow big battles and squadron level actions to be refought as evidenced by the scenarios in the back, including Trafalgar and yet the player is tasked with choosing whether to load grape, chain, single, double or triple shot into their guns at any given range, not only that but the precise mix of double shot for instance needs to be specific, namely are we talking double ball or ball and grape?

So my question immediately was, am I as an Admiral or Squadron Commodore focussed on what I expect my junior officers and gun-captains to take care of or am I supposed to be focussed on running my battle and having those decision points taken for me by a game mechanic representing the decisions of those junior leaders. However if I choose to focus on that lower level of commander, say Captain Brooke commanding HMS Shannon bearing down on the USS Chesapeake, then yes I probably am going to take a distinct interest in making sure my officer of the deck has ordered the gun captains to have loaded double shot and grape ready to take advantage of the point-blank pass I'm about to attempt.

Part of the fun of messing about with rule sets is coming up with materials to go with them,
like my latest damage records for the Trafalgar orders of battle.

The other aspect I am keen to include is the randomised activation process championed by Rich Clarke and Nick Skinner in their Lardy series of games which really generates the friction that characterises warfare in general and for me puts that 'fly in the ointment' when decisions are taken but stuff can happen to frustrate them being carried out in a timely manner and so that has to be the activation driven mechanism whatever rule set I decide to use, and are they adaptable to that mechanism if not originally designed that way?

Then I am looking at how well the rules can adjust to the lower level of game play to cater for the Shannon v Chesapeake type encounter or even the Scourge v Sans Culottes action with even smaller vessels, without them ending up a completely different set of rules, if that is possible, with the advantage, if they can cope, that the learning curve for players moving from one game type to the other is that much reduced through familiarity with the core rules.

Finally I am looking for the rules to clearly enable identifying the victor and the level of victory or defeat achieved when play stops, be that through a time limit or one side being so demoralised from casualties and damage that they will be forced to attempt to break contact, thus preventing the wargamer in all of us pushing our model warriors further than their historical counterparts who most likely would have broken off the action much earlier.

Four significant influences on my choice of rules

So which rules have my efforts focussed on and why? Well four sets figure large at the moment all for different and similar reasons.

War by Sail are a really nicely designed set of rules and I really enjoy the games I am able to create with them and the level of detailed information on gun fit outs for warships of all the key nations covered from 1550 to 1815 is worth the cover price alone whether you play the rules regularly or not and will be a turn to reference source for that alone.

Kiss Me Hardy were one of the first of the Lardy stable of rule sets and the chit/card activation method was rather unique when they first arrived on the age of sail naval wargames scene, an aspect of them I really love, and with the addition of 'To Covet Glory' by Chris Stoesen to cover small ship actions and the article 'Messing around with Boats' in the 2011 Christmas Special by Brian Weathersby looking at adding greater variety to the ships modelled in the rules. they have stood the test of time and still give a great game able to cater for big and small actions.

Materials such as these should help me present a visually attractive
report of how individual ships performed in a game

Not only that but Nick Skinner and other Lardy KMH fans put together several articles (Time Tunnel to Trafalgar - Lardies Game Day 2005 Christmas Special and Refighting Trafalgar, Game Report and Scenario 1805 - 2005 Summer Special) covering the playing and the planning of their 2005 Bicentennial Trafalgar game which has formed the foundation reading of my own planning process and has meant that I have not had to reinvent the wheel, all be it the models I will use are a bit bigger!

The other two sets are from A & A Game Engineering, like War by Sail available through Wargames Vault. I have to say I really like the layout of these two rule sets, with their minimalistic style reminiscent of my early days in the hobby before rules became glossy books full of wargamers porn, spread among the same old rules but more colourfully produced and costing a small mortgage.

Both 'Form Line of Battle' by a stalwart of the Naval Wargaming scene, David Manley and 'Grand Fleet Actions in the Age of Sail' by Alan Butler share a similar layout and no nonsense production ethos with two sets of solid rules in a black and white, low printer ink requiring format including enough simple diagrams to support the text and tables and both offering lots of great granularity in the games they are designed for.

Key aspects in both is the attention to producing battles of the era and not some sort of 'Pirates of the Caribbean' type game that usually ends up ignoring the Fighting Instructions and the struggle for commanders to maintain a coherent fighting formation and encourage players to dogfight with ships of the line, or take on the odd 'denizen of the deep', thus I think both sets will influence hugely my final choice of rules which inevitably will not be any one set but more likely my own concoction based on the ideas from all four to a lesser or greater extent.

Simple record sheets should also make it easy for players to keep track 
of each ship's status.

That concoction is coming together in anticipation of lockdown restrictions easing and table top gaming resuming so that I can play test the ideas with the chaps and I am eagerly awaiting the call up for a vaccination from the Chinese Bat Flu.

Finally the rules I have featured here in my personal analysis are by no means exhaustive but they all share the normal attention to aspects typical in all the rules for this period of naval warfare, namely sailing attitudes to the wind, gunnery, ranges and damage tables, critical hit tables etc etc, offering different emphasis as outlined, and I may not have mentioned your own particular favourite set, not because I am unaware of them, which I am probably not, but because the rules choices I have made fit in with the games I plan to produce and tick the boxes of my own criteria of high simulation and lots of fun to play, key aspects that are important to me.

And of course the next part of the collection is already well into the planning phase

I know I am not alone in the vain search for the perfect set of rules which are as rare as Unicorns, or should I say Kraken, but like many others enjoy the process of the search and then fiddling around with those that make the cut in an effort to create that Unicorn.

Next up: Six new French generic third rates in Revolutionary War trim join Admiral Villeneuve's Combined Fleet line up and I'll take a look at what's left to do on the Trafalgar collection, plus Steve and I are reaching a conclusion to our latest game on Vassal, Ardennes 44 from GMT.

Richard III, Columbia Games using Vassal

Over the Christmas break, Steve and I reacquainted ourselves with another of the Columbia Games family of block games we have enjoyed playing face to face in the past, namely Richard III this time on Vassal and recreating the bloody events of the 'Cousins War' latterly come to be known as the War of the Roses.

The Columbia take on this dramatic time in British history is a campaign game of three separate but linked games of seven turns recreating the fighting and fleeing abroad by the losing faction, raising money and troops reinvading and having another go at claiming the throne that came to characterise the wars between the rival houses of York and Lancaster with each house represented by a hierarchy of five Royal Nobles backed up by noble supporters and able to supplement their forces with those of the church, levies, mercenaries and rebels.

Of course the built in fog of war by the use of blocks, that hide the identity of what forces are gathered before you by the enemy, means battle is always fraught with hidden menace as the strength and quality of the enemy is only revealed when the opposing parties are brought to the battle board.

Then by adding in the odd plague, storms at sea, and a variable number of Action Points generated by a hand of cards that enable forces to be raised and moved, the game sets up a framework for both sides to achieve dominance in the kingdom by ending up having more nobles loyal to them than the other side.

The game sets the scene by having the weak and ineffective Henry VI, the grandson of the usurper Henry IV and presiding over the loss of noble estates in France following his fathers early death after his victory at Agincourt barely holding the situation together and with the House of York set to invade from Ireland and Calais to march on London.

In our game I took the House of Lancaster and Steve York as we concentrated our forces in the South of England in the counties of Hampshire, Wiltshire and Oxfordshire that resulted in the Lancastrians forced to take a boat to France and with the map below dominated by Yorkist sympathisers and just two Lancastrian hold outs in Wiltshire and Devon. 

The first campaign map and the Yorkists have control of the kingdom with Somerset and the other Lancastrian royals kicking their heels in 'Belle-France'.

The only glimmer on the horizon for the Lancastrians was our decision to include the 'Historical Events' additional rules that sees the rolling of a d6 by the King, the Pretender and the King again and consulting a list of plausible events that occurred in the short periods of peace that held between the series of campaigns.

In the event Steve ended up seeing both Richard Duke of York and Edward Earl of March succumb to a bad case of the vapours and die leaving him three heirs to work with through the next two campaigns.

The Lancastrian power base, following the defeat in the first campaign had taken a decisive shift to the north of England and so I decided to launch my second campaign in Cumbria and Scotland which on reflection was  not such a great plan as I had envisaged.

By focussing my efforts in the north, I allowed Steve the time to mop up my supporters in the south and the time it took crossing the various parts of mountainous terrain on the Scottish border and over the Pennines left little scope to  press my campaign south and with Steve carefully putting few nobles in range of my Lancastrian hoards but leaving his forward defence of the Midlands to levies and mercenaries he was able to close out the second campaign with a couple more nobles on the board forcing the Lancastrians to flee to France yet again.

Oh dear, my cunning plan foiled in the second campaign, with Yorkist nobles relatively unaffected by my slow marching Lancastrian hordes and so it was off back to France yet again, and not even Warwick wanted to come with me!

The historical events chart nearly came up trumps for Lancaster as Steve managed to annoy Warwick the Kingmaker enough to see him change sides only to find on his second die roll that Warwick had changed his mind and re-joined the Yorkist fold.

Oh well things were looking decidedly uphill for the Lancastrians with a three noble advantage to York on the map I would have to try and kill that many and not loose anymore of my own to have a hope of reclaiming the throne and I would not make the mistake of landing too far away from the midlands to have enough time to try and bring on one or more major battles where I could hope to kill Yorkists.

All over for Henry VI and God Save King Richard the III despite that rather noticeable hunch back, oh and where are his nephews? 

For the final campaign Henry, Somerset and Prince Edward joined with Stanley in the royal county of Lancaster bringing down the Scots and the nobles from Cumbria and Northumbria whilst raising the Levies of Newcastle together with the Church troops of York and some Lincolnshire rebels.

The final clash came in the Royal estates of Derbyshire as Steve pushed forward a picket line of militia and mercenaries bolstered by the occasional noble to frustrate my advance and leaving the map above solidly white from the midlands southward, protecting London, and a stack of dead red noble blocks against a smaller stack of white ones just off the Bristol Channel.

Thus history was reversed and Richard Duke of York took the throne as King Richard the III and didn't end up in a parking lot in Leicester!

It was fun playing Richard III again and certainly a challenge playing the Lancastrians who don't quite have the quality of the Yorkists and are difficult in my opinion to come back with from a poor start which I certainly managed to deliver and Steve managed very well by helping me to lose my nobles whilst killing his mercenaries in the later campaigns, coupled with a poor decision on my part for my landings in the second campaign.

Of course the card play and available events and action points make sure one game can be quite different from another and the historical event chart adds a little extra spice especially for the House that is on top having to suffer two die rolls on it between campaigns.

So with medieval England in our wake and with 2021 beckoning Steve and I headed off back to WWII with our current game now into its third week and one that is a bit of a monster ideal for playing on Vassal, 'Ardennes 44' from GMT with Steve taking the Allies and me climbing aboard my Tiger II and heading off towards the Schnee Eifel, more anon.

Next up: Well I'm not sure exactly, the editorial team are still debating the next post, but at the top of the queue are my six French generic 3rd rates in Revolutionary War trim set to join Villeneuve's Trafalgar line up, The sticks are up and they are going into the fitting out yard to have sails and rigging issued from the stores this weekend. 

My normal building routine has had a slight departure from normal with recent messing about on the games table, trying out rule sets and I might take time to take a look at rules in the age of sail following a chat with the chaps at the DWG on our weekly Zoom gathering to talk wargaming and other stuff whilst enjoying a beer or two.

The other plan is to update on the Trafalgar project with all three fleets nearing completion and the first naval reviews being planned.

Vimeiro Hill - Battle of Vimeiro 1808 from O'er the Hills at Tiny Wars Played Indoors

Back in December last year I posted a link here to Bill Slavin's blog 'Tiny Wars Played Indoors' as he and friends commenced a playthrough of scenarios from O'er The Hills, starting with 'The Leopard's Debut' covering the Battle of Rolica.

The Leopard's Debut - Battle of Rolica

Bill and I have conversed over the many years that I have been posting to JJ's and I know we share a love of Napoleonics and table-top terrain to create the look of the battles we are trying to recreate and you only need to take a look at the tables Bill turns out for his games to appreciate the effort he puts in to get the look he does and I love that kind of passion for the hobby.

https://standtogames.co.uk/shop/ols/products/oer-the-hills-rules

So I thought you might like to see his second game played following on from the first with the fighting around Vimeiro Hill at the Battle of Vimeiro on the 21st August 1808, which as it was for the French in the historical battle, a very 'tough nut' to crack with Wellesley enjoying interior lines, great observation of the enemy and terrain, including poor cavalry country and reverse slopes to confound the moves of his opponent.

During our several playtests of this particular scenario I seem to recall only one French outright victory, when an audacious infantry attack on Vimiero town itself managed to dislodge the British garrison and then resist all attempts to dislodge them for the rest of the game.

It would seem in this latest run through the French had an equally tough encounter, but able to give a very good account of themselves and Bill outlines some of his own thoughts on tweaks he introduced for his game.

I love this way of playing with history and welcome any other ideas as I would never claim to have all the answers when trying to capture the known facts of these actions into a scenario that gives interest to both sides, despite the factors that weigh in favour of one side or the other; and the best scenarios for me are the ones that offer victory conditions other than the simple binary win-lose options, rather instead challenging the players to do a better job than their historical counterparts faced with broadly similar issues to overcome.

As you can see from these pictures from Bill's game, the look of it is amazing, so if you're interested in this subject, take the time to take a look at Bill's report of how their game played together with loads more eye-candy to accompany the comment.

Tiny Wars Played Indoors - Battle of Vimeiro Hill 21st August 1808

I'm really looking forward to the next instalment where I gather there are plans to play the linked game of this scenario and out on Junot's right flank at Ventosa Hill.

Next up Adventures in Vassal with Richard III