Chicago Skirmish Wargames

This week, I organized a game of Galleys and Galleons. As a naval game based on Song of Blades and Heroes, it is largely familiar, but also has some mechanics of its own to reflect the different focus. The two most noticeable changes are to movement and combat results. Most ships move either a short, medium, or long based on their orientation to the direction of the wind. No actions are spent on movement. Instead actions can be spent to turn or reduce speed. Damage to ships can result in  exchanging activation dice for ones of a different color. There is also a critical hit table that is rolled on instead of a model being killed when doubled in combat. If one of the damaged activation dice later roll a 1, the ship also has to roll on a critical hit table.  Overall, this did not make the game any more complicated than SBH with its greater number of special abilities. However, I'm fairly certain we missed a couple of subtleties in this first game.

We used my chalkboard for the battle, which made marking the wind direction easy. For ships, we used Uncharted Seas models I painted up but had been awaiting a game for quite some time. The setup for this scenario saw Frank(orcs), Karl(elves), and I(humans) each starting in our own corner with two ships.  We had to get to the islands and search them for treasure. After a couple of turns, Karl found the first treasure on the southern island.  I attempted to search the northern island, but found nothing. Frank  intercepted and sunk my smaller ship.

Meanwhile, Karl beat me to the central island and found the treasure there. At this point, Karl had found two caches of treasure, Frank had one, and I had none. In an attempt to capture a treasure, I sent my command ship after one of the Elf ships. The orcs were also closing in for a chance to sink the elves.

In the end, Karl's elves got away with their treasures. Frank and I were not able to sink or capture Karl's maneuverable ships. Karl won with two treasures in his possession. Frank had one treasure and one enemy sunk, so came in second. I had no significant accomplishments to report.

This went pretty smoothly for a learning game. It is different enough from Song of Blades and Heroes to provide its own engaging challenge but not so different that the changes make it hard to play with our longstanding knowledge of SBH. I think we all had fun playing and hopefully we will play again some time soon. I might even try to adapt this scenario for more players and run it at a convention.

-Tim