Naval Wargames:  Ironclad Era
	Photos & Reports	Rules	Background

Hobby Show 2002 display - 3, 4 May 2002, Including Rob H's Napoleonics, ACW Naval (Mobile Bay), and WWII Land

Battle of the Mid Atlantic - 21 Dec 2000, Smoke on the Water rules.  Part of the first Diplomacy Campaign, 2000.

Battle of Venice - 10 Dec 2000, Smoke on the Water rules.  Part of the first Diplomacy Campaign, 2000.

Chris got us involved in Naval wargaming when he bought Dave and I a number of beautiful looking Thoroughbred 1/600 scale ship models from the US Civil War.  Chris had always been interested in naval history and he and Dave had fought some balsa wood navies many years ago in the 70s.  One particular Trickett tactic has become legend - it was a WWII game for which Chris and Dave were to construct large opposing fleets from balsa wood.  Chris, of course worked painstakingly for weeks on his fleet.  Dave made a small number of surface ships and carried on with other things not related to wargames.  Then, the night before the game, Dave realised he had a pitiful number of ships.  In true Dave fashion for those days, he slapped together a large number of "submarines" which were were vaguely hacked approximations of splintered balsa wood.  On the day of the game, the "submarines" were conveniently around a corner (the game was played on a floor).  When Chris's magnifently crafted fleet came around the corner, they were slaughtered by barrages of torpedoes.

I don't think poor Chris ever got over that.

Perhaps the gifts of ships during Christmas 1997 was a way of  dealing with the undoubtably deep emotional scars left by Dave's balsa wood depravities...  In any event, it has launched us off in another direction.

When we got into ACW Naval, we had relatively little background in naval history of that period, so commercially available rules were a necessity.  We've really only had experience with one set of rules, though i have visited some Ironclads rules offerings in the files section of the Ironclads Yahoo group in a search to satisfy my gunnery concerns (see below).

Smoke on the Water (Canis Publication web site no longer available) by Jason Gorringe & Simon Thomas.  A traditional structured sequence set of rules.  However, they have made the movement phase a fun exercise by making you plot your moves before movement takes place, which for inexperienced and experienced players alike sometimes results in friendly ships colliding or running aground.  Of course, such unhappy events are more likely to occur in a riverine envirnoment....  In any event, I think this is a great approach to movement, which prevents the sort of micromanagement we've seen some folks do with movement to avoid just such collisions or line of sight interference. But see my following comments on gunnery.

January 2003  I have, however, become unhappy with the gunnery rules in this set and have written my own gunnery house rules (see note below) which attempt to cut back on the dice rolling.  In the link for my house rules, have a look at my reasons for why I did this.  While my motivation was primarily to reduce the number of die rolls involved, especially with ships with large batteries, a good part of it was philosopically motivated, ie, in terms of wargame rules design theory.

June 2004, I have done nothing much more on the gunnery house rules and am unhappy with them myself.  However, I am currently working with Age of Sail and I think this might be an area of naval gaming more developed than the ACW, so perhaps I will revisit SOTW and my gunnery rules at a later date.