Broadside Empires of Steel is a print and play game that kickstarted many years ago. I thought it'd be a good entry into naval (which I've been vaguely interested in, but put off by the crunchiness of many rules and the steep learning curve).
In principle the ships could be printed in FDM, but my original printer (Ender 5) didn't really give me satisfying results. So I waited till I was dabbling in resin, which I don't really like to print with (too stinky for my space and too much post print clean up....with stinky cleansers).
Doug visited a couple weekends ago and I dragooned him into playing a game with me. There are rules for creating point based fleets and missions, but I don't have that many ships and my space is small. I decided to go for a small scenario based on a kriegspiel the mad padre ran, Swan of the East.
In the game I had a command of 2 ships (The HMAS battlecruiser Australia and the HMAS light cruiser Chatham. I was blockading Rabaul to try and catch the german raiders (this was a ww1 game). The Australia was in close blockade with the Chatham over the horizon (or vice versa). Wireless from the base ended up summoning the sister ships (armoured cruisers) Scharnhost and Gneisenau, looking for some easy kills. In the campaign one of the German ships took a critical hit and started to spin, the other one retreated, but not before Australia was sufficiently damaged to sink over a few hours. I wanted to replay the encounter to see what might happen. Amazingly the points values were almost identical.
