One HourTrafalgar

Well, if you are going to a Napoleonic naval battle, you may as well do a big one. After the success of Actium, John produced a Napoleonic naval version of his one hour naval rules and put on the Battle of Trafalger at 1:3. We did this a few weeks ago, pre lock down.

The Franco-Spanish fleet in a ragged crescent. I took the French and Diego the Spanish. We were heading for Cadiz, somewhat handicapped by sailing close hauled into the wind with a lee shore to starboard. Ideal conditions for a fleet action!

My flagship, the Beaucantare. Vive la France. The ships are all 1/3000th Lammng from Johns collection and dating from the early 1980s.

Perfidious Albion. Collingwoods column is on the left (commanded by Tim), and Nelsons column on the right, commanded by Simon. I'm sure his RN experience will come in handy. This lot had the weather gauge, with the wind over their port quarter. Oh dear.

Rather strangely, the English fleet veered off to port. Perhaps they are heading for Cadiz too?

Well that's OK. It gave a chance for the Allies to sort themselves into separate French and Spanish squadrons. Much more tidy.

Collingwoods squadron enagages. The Royal Sovereign takes a pasting, but RN gunnery is devastating, boosted by the superior speed of the upwind ships which lets them loose off rolling broadsides as they sail past. One of the French ships has already struck her colours.

Well, things could be going better. Two more crippled French ships.

Oooer, half of Collingwods squadron breaks the French line. Poor old Beaucantare gets shot to bits after being raked from the bow.

And promptly vanishes from the tabletop, having been reduced to matchwood.

However.... the English have now moved downwind of the rest of the French fleet, so my tail end charlies put on sail and break the British line as well, scattering raking fire in all directions. At this point, I should have boarded the crippled RN ships with my fresh French ones, but I completely forgot in all the excitement. Sacre bleu!

The RN don't seem too phased by being crippled and promptly proceeded to blast my ships to pieces at point blank range. The lone survivor is Achille in the top left.

Nelson finally turns back south and engages the Spanish vanguard. The Spanish are duly shot to pieces too while Nelson sails on unharmed. The Spanish did eventually land some hits on Victory, but to little avail as superior RN gunnery and the wind gauge made short work of them.

I have a cunning plan! Achille tacks and sails off close hauled to the southwest. If I can make the far corner, I can then tear into Cadiz with the wind behind me. The RN can only follow at 2" per turn.

One ship is able to catch me, but I managed to damage it, which allowed me to outsail it.

Sadly, I didn't sail quite far enough away to get out of range of its guns and we ended up in a messy boarding action. With both ships crippled, it was evens, except the French were on -1 and the British were on +1 and the RN inevitably triumphed. It was a glorious interlude however, and the captured French captain was wined and dined in honour by the gracious British.

That all went jolly well. The sailing rules worked very well indeed, although we did struggle a bit with some of the acute angles (close hauled was between 22.5 and 90 degrees to the wind) and a square grid would probably have helped. The combat was fine, if a bit lethal, but that is the One Hour Wargames way. Not a game for ditherers, that is for sure.

Coronel and Falklands

One of my go-to scenarios for WW1 naval games is the paired battles of Coronel and the Falklands. They are small enough to be manageable, large enough to be interesting and by doing both, both sides get to 'win'. (Only a criminally negligent German can lose Coronel, even with the Canopus present).

In this particular case I wanted to playtest the joint modifications John and I had made to the naval version of the One Hour Wargames rules to make sure they could handle cruiser/battlecruiser actions as well as more traditional battle lines.

Both battles were played with my 1/3000th scale naval stuff at the Sheffield club.

Coronel, opening moves. Otranto leads the British line while Glasgow lurks in the background. Von Spee's Germans are all lined up with Scharnhorst leading.

Otranto takes a pasting (the big red blob is ten hits!).

The British reply against the big German armoured cruisers is modest.

Otranto goes down while Monmouth and Good Hope take some more hits.

The British T is crossed, with predictable results, and Craddocks squadron goes down.

So, off to the Falklands (clearly strong winds have made the camera shake in the observer aircraft). More fun for the British as Invincible and Inflexible present rather more of a threat to Gneisenau and Scharnhorst than Craddocsk elderly armoured cruisers at Coronel.

The mighty British battle cruisers, although the British player would be wise to bear in mind that these really are just heavy cruisers with 12" guns, not super fast dreadnoughts loaded up with armour. Something contemporary Admirals seemed to struggle with too.

Von Spee adopted an interesting converging formation, pairing up the armoured and light cruisers, while the British aimed to keep their BCs out of harms way and shell the Germans from long range.

A vicious close quarters cruiser action developed as the Germans tried to break through the Royal Navy.

The carnage continued.

But finally one of the German light cruisers succumbed. Meanwhile Gnesenaus was close enough to actually damage Invincible. Ooops.

The British suddenly realised the grave danger, but to late for Invincible which took a real pasting, only three hits off sinking. Gneisenau and Scharnhorst split up. taking on one BC each at close range.

Inflexible won its duel with only minor damage, and Scharnhorst went down.

But Gneisenau failed to finish off the crippled Invincible, and in turn went down in a hail of gun fire.

This all went pretty well and was a lot of fun. The British managed ot avoid the ignominy of losing one of their precious Battlecruisers and Von Spee put up a really heroic fight against very long odds. The game mechanisms all held together well, and by at large were the ones we used for Jutland.

Mini Jutland 2

John and I decided to try out our revised One Hour WW1 naval rules with another outing to Jutland. The main differences were a rationalisation of the various conditions for halving hits, and more of a Fletcher Pratt/GQ style incremental damage model. So every five hits reduced firepower and speed (indicated by the yellow and red hit markers). We ran this game using Johns WW1 ships on a 3'x3' cloth. The ship ratios are extreme, each model represents around six real ships (I think!).

The German fleet enters.

And the Grand Fleet in the distance, battlecruisers already out front.

Early exchanges of long range fire damage the German BC.

More pounding.

The British BCs take some hits.

German BCs try to flee.

But it doesn't work out too well. Scratch some BCs.

Soon followed by the British ones. Clearly something wrong with our ships today.

The opposing lines of Battleships start to sort themselves out.

And line up for some hard pounding.

The Battleships blaze away while various lighter ships fuss around.

Damage slowly mounts.

Things aren't going to well for the Germans (all those red markers) but the RN has taken lots of damage too.

Ooops, the edge of the world seems to have intervened.

And suddenly it all gets very messy.

Kaboom. Although the Grand Fleet has also taken a real hammering.

This was really quite a satisfactory outing, the rules mechanisms seem to work well enough within the One Hour Wargames framework, and although a few things inevitably creak a bit in such a simple set of rules, they produce an enjoyable game. I don't think the authors of GQ3 are going to be quaking in their boots, but hey, we just did Jutland in less than an hour. We'll be taking this to COW in July, so people can judge for themselves.
 

One Hour Tshushima

I was rather taken with the naval variant of Neil Thomas's One Hour Wargames rules, so I had a bit of a fiddle around to adapt them for the Russo-Japanese War. I ended up with the same group of ship classes as De Bellis Navalis - Battleships, Armoured Cruisers, Light Cruisers and Destroyers/torpedo boats. The main thing I was keen to avoid was excessive ganging up of fire which marred our WW1 outing of the rules, so I simply added a rule that any shots after the first at any particular target were halved, thus encouraging the players to spread their ships fire out in a more historical manner.

I used a standard Tshushima scenario, but as I'd kept each ship as taking 15 hits I used a ratio of 1:2 for light cruisers and 1:4 for destroyers then ran the whole thing at half scale as I don't actually have enough Russian battleships for the full battle line. It was still a fairly impressive ship total though.

The main difference from the standard OHW rules is that ships move and shoot, otherwise it is much the same. IGOUGO, bang away by rolling dice, bigger things do more damage although I added in armour for BBs and CAs which halved hits against them. Somewhat foolishly I added in ramming, but more on that anon.

The Japanese Fleet, four CA, two BB, three CL and two DD

The Russians, six BB and two CA

The Japanese armoured ships form line of battle.

Russian CAs take a pasting. Each red counter is five hits.

Leading Russian BB takes a few hits and turns away.

Japanese armoured cruisers are suffering.

Destroyers somewhat unwisely decide to try out the ramming rules by ramming the damaged Russian battleships. The absence of destroyers in the subsequent photos shows how well that went.

The opposing lines of armoured ships blaze away at each other and damage mounts.

Damage mounts as the counters build up. Japanese CLs at the very top.

In an attempt to stop the Russians slipping past, the Japanese line turns towards the Russians, rather like Scheer at Jutland but in the opposite direction!

Sadly a disastrous exchange of fire results in one sunk Russian BB, but three Japanese armoured ships head for the bottom.

At game end, the cruiser action can be seen continuing in the distance but the game is over as the Japanese have lost over 25% of their armoured ships.

I've played Tshushima a few times and there is a reason that it is remembered as a great Japanese victory - it is a really tough battle for the Japanese and in my wargames they have always lost! I did somewhat mishandle the Japanese, which didn't help. Turned in the wrong direction at one point and was wrong footed thereafter as the Japanese ended up sailing in the opposite direction to the Russians instead of parallel.

The rules themselves worked very well, particularly the battle lines sailing along blazing away at each either. Much better than the frankly silly spectacle of four ships ganging up one on individual. The ramming rules were a complex irrelevance, but one thing we felt would be useful was incremental damage, so at each five hits ships drop 2" speed and -1 off gunnery. Those changes were introduced into the WW1 set and we re-ran Jutland to try them out, but that is another post.