Broadside Empires of Steel: Blockade of Rabaul (first game)

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. 

Enfilade 2023: Friday Easy Play Trafalgar (sails of glory)

Once again I made the pilgrimage down to Olympia, WA for enfilade. My organizational skills were miserable this year and I was punished by terrible traffic, and limited options for gaming (the best games get scooped early via pre registration). I found myself playing Trafalgar on Friday night with a gaming friend, Bob, who I mostly see at Enfilade yearly. Bob prefers to play the French, and notes that if you lose it's historical, and if you win you get to gloat.

 

 The setup for the game narrowed the action to where the British were cutting the French line. A significant chunk of the French line ended up out of the battle due to the wind and the remaining French got pasted by the better British ships with local superiority.

To add insult to injury the French are sailing VERY close to the wind and can't make a left/port turn without having a very good chance (~70%) of stalling (caught in irons). Problematically the French were so close to the edge of the table that they couldn't really turn to the right/starboard much either, or they'd run off the board. Easy play indeed....the scope for decisions was VERY limited. It might have been better to have the french run on auto pilot in some way. 

A quick naval bloodbath; Intro War at Sea AAR

 After six months of silence I managed to get a post done....and a game AAR at that. Local gamer Garret has been quietly collecting the (mostly?) defunct game War at Sea. I imagine you can pick up a good set of minis for reasonable prices. While not my favorite style of game (each ship has it's own card with different values/rules) it does keep the bespoke rule craziness to a modest level. 

 

 

 

 

One of the big drivers was the ability to hammer out a game VERY quickly (important when we both have 2 children under 4!). I think this one took about 90 minutes with learning for me. Garret has a useful little computer program that has a database of his available gear and will wizard up lists. He made two reasonably balanced ones....An american fleet with a cruiser, aircraft carrier, and 2 destroyers (plus planes), and a japanese one with 2 destroyers, a heavy cruiser, a sub, and a heap of air. 

Objective is to seize the 3 white objectives on the midline, and/or destroy your enemy. Victory is sorta sudden death as when you hit a certain VP total you win (I suspect at the end of the turn). I was VERY concerned about the japanese sub to the Northwest so swarmed it with planes dropping depth charges. Unfortunately the amount of fighters I had to bombers was....unbalanced, so the japanese were able to sink my carrier in the first turn. Yikes!

Land bases were the only thing keeping the aircraft up, which now means they come ever second turn in the absence of special rules (some bombers with larger fuel and bomb loads can 'loiter' and stay on station without needing to reload each turn). 

The second turn we both kept as much aircraft in play as possible and continued to hammer the ships. I decided to focus reducing the number of targets so ignored his cruiser in favor of killing destroyers (which carry torpedoes which are pretty swingy in this game but do heaps of damage). 

We were rapidly reaching a point where all we had were one or two crippled ships and far too many bombers for any sailors health.

The one turn of naval gunner and torpedos saw my cruiser and one (of two) destroyers go down, but cleared the table. The final turn the japanese continued to struggle for the draw to kill my final destroyer before it could claim a VP point. It narrowly avoided the angry wrath of the japanese bomber force to pull out a win.

A fun beer and pretzel type game that you can hammer out a couple of games in a session. I feel that it's obvious you need more fighters but Garret makes it sound as though there is a tricky element of balancing various needs without leaving yourself catastrophically open to certain attacks.