Optimised for Rowing

 "There are no galley-slaves in the royal vessel of divine love - every man works his oar voluntarily!"

- Saint Francis de Sales

Someone - and I wish I could be more specific, but I wasn't paying attention - has acquired some ancient galleys and is looking for a set of rules. As part of the process of passing some on to him (or possibly, though unlikely, her) we cracked out James's Punic wars fleets and had at it. The rules were 'Fleet of Battle' as written by James and Peter and published in Wargames Illustrated (*) a few years ago. We played them as printed, in other words nothing like the the last time that we played a set of rules with that title, or probably as we shall play next time. I'm fairly sure that last time we did this we were trying to make them work with hexes, the same hexes that can still be seen on the tabletop in the photo above.

In any event, they worked well enough, with a bit of fudging where there appeared to be bits missing. For reasons of space the published version effectively only contains the QRS and not actually any rules per se. Obviously we know how it's all meant to hang together, but you have to wonder what anyone else made of it. Still, as I always say, if you can't rely on the common sense of wargamers then what can you rely on?

* I think; it could just as easily have been one of the others.

In Which Not Spending Money Doesn't Last Long

 AKA Cruel Seas the unboxing. I've had a look through the contents of the Cruel Seas starter box which I have inherited. It's all there (*), indeed there are a couple of extras: a metal casting of a U-boat conning tower breaking the waves and a couple of US PT boat sprues. I suspect the latter were free giveaways with a copy of Wargame Illustrated back when the game was launched. I shall not be using the PT boats however, I shall stick to the Royal Navy and Kriegsmarine options, from which I shall be selecting the mid-to-late war options, for no better reason than they have bigger guns.

The rules don't seem especially innovative, but the gimmick which catches the eye (as it probably did when I saw the game demonstrated at Vapnartak 2019, although I can remember nothing whatever about it) is that torpedoes are not mediated solely through the rolling of dice, but instead actually set off across the table represented by their own little model and either hit their target or don't. I use the term 'gimmick' advisedly, because on the one hand it's the aspect which makes me really want to play the game, while on the other hand my instinct is that I shall tire of it fairly quickly.

If one is to fire torpedoes then one has to fire them at something. The starter box lives up to its name in that it contains everything one needs to play Scenario 1 in the rulebook, but sadly torpedoes don't make an appearance until Scenario 2, and that requires some sort of small coastal freighter or tanker to act as a target; said vessel is not in the box. Those from the official range - now interestingly available from Skytrex rather than Warlord Games - clock in at around £30 or so, but perfectly acceptable 3D printed alternatives are available on eBay for a fiver, and so I bought one. Notwithstanding the Christmas post, it arrived within a couple of days and there it is above. A halfway decent bloggist would have put one of the MTBs in for scale, but that's not how we roll around here.

(*) I have of course had to download a very unimpressive ten pages of Errata to the rule book.

In Which I Don't Spend Any Money, But It's Still A Substitute For Doing Something

 By far the biggest cause of my loss of wargaming mojo has been the death earlier in the year of Peter, a long-time member of our small group. He is, of course, remembered whenever we meet up, especially when repeated bad dice rolls occur; that being one of his superpowers, along with getting really, really annoyed about making  repeated bad dice rolls. This was certainly the case this week when we refought Salamanca. It was expected to be a game that would last two or, quite possibly, three evenings. Instead, it was all wrapped up well inside two hours. Wellington, that was me, rolled consistently high whilst Mark, as the French, channelled Peter to an uncanny extent; except thankfully for the throwing dice at the wall in anger, restricting himself to swapping his dice repeatedly. I won't pretend it was a very good game, but it was certainly funny.

When Peter died we were asked to help dispose of the very large stockpile he had amassed over fifty years in the hobby. And when I say 'very large' I mean it literally. I think a kind interpretation of his approach would be to assume that he was storing up projects for retirement when he would have more time to actually get any use out the stuff he had bought. Anyway, this process is underway, although in the interests of accuracy I need to point out that James and Mark have done everything and my role has merely been one of supportive encouragement. Boardgames, model kits etc are steadily being put on eBay, figures are being sold through a well-known trader in pre-loved collections, and the books will follow in a similar fashion in due course. However, we have, with permission, put aside a couple of small things for us to play with, which after all is what they are meant for, and think of him as we do so. For example, our recent games of Nimitz have been with Peter's ships. I have now taken a starter set of 'Cruel Seas', which Peter bought at Vapnartak in 2018 or 2019 and which was never seen again, with the intention of painting the boats up and putting on a memorial game.

So, from famine to feast, two new projects for 2025. Watch this space, although given that it's Christmas, feel free to start the watching in a couple of weeks from now.

Empress Augusta Bay

 This blog has been ignoring wargaming recently, but wargaming has not been ignoring your bloggist. James has recently rediscovered the joys of blogging and has produced a summary of recent games in the legendary wargames room. I won't repeat anything except to concur that the last crusades game using To the Strongest! was a belter. For various good reasons we have been having shorter gaming evenings and the likelihood of winning flowed backwards and forwards over two evenings. The only slightly odd thing was that going into what turned out to be the final combat either side could have won a crushing victory depending on the result. That doesn't affect how good a game it was, but does make one question the victory conditions.

This week we turned to a naval game using the newish rules Nimitz. I only took one photo and that wasn't a very good one. The rules however are rather good: easy to pick up and very playable. The Japanese won a refight of the battle of Empress Augusta Bay, albeit one transposed to daytime. As with any first game of anything, I wouldn't repeat what I did with my forces a second time. The main moral I took from the game was that ships cannot really be used defensively. Having said that I also ended up thinking that charging straight at the enemy at full speed wasn't likely to achieve much either. Somewhere between the two lies the sweet spot perhaps. We are having another game next week so I shall have a chance to put my analysis into practice. After that it's a grand Peninsular campaign in which it seems I am to be in command of the British.

Laon, 1814

 C&C Napoleonics returned to the annexe for the first time since September 3rd 2019. Could we remember the rules? What do you think?

At some point in the last few weeks we had another - and I suspect final for a while - crack at the ancient galley rules. Overall, I think everyone is happy with them. They give a quick, fun, decisive game with multiple players each controlling multiple ships and it all wrapping up in a couple of hours. If I had to search for negatives I would say that the situation where many ships end up locked together and resulting in a mass melee requires an application of wargamers' common sense to make it work. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but it will be difficult to write down and even harder to explain. I don't know if James intends to publish these, so perhaps that point is moot.

Anyway, back to C&C, which is another game that gives a quick, fun game, all over in an evening. We didn't do too badly with the rules really, our main problem being trying to keep track of all the national characteristics associated with the various units. Having said that, we also got the rules for cavalry vs square badly wrong, but it was the same for both sides. We had a go at the Laon epic scenario from the C&C Napoleonic website using the epic rules from expansion 6 and the tactics cards from expansion 5. I really like the latter in particular; they ensure that plans don't always work as intended and do it in a manner which appeals to me. The French won when the Old Guard stormed through the middle destroying everything in their path. The Prussians being a bit too feisty early on was their undoing. We shall have another go next week: Friedland I think.

Go back to your oar, Forty-One

Five or so years ago, before the galleys were put away, I think we had agreed that grids were the way to go, not least because it avoids all debate about who can ram/board/rake what and when. When the galleys once again emerged from the display cabinet last week, we picked it up where we left it: hex grids with ships occupying two hexes, principally I think because ships are longer than they are wide. Whilst last week's game was fun, there was I think a consensus that it wasn't quite right. If you look carefully at the picture below you can see that one change made was that ships are now back in one hex

.

The big difference that makes is to make turning easier, not so much for the models, but rather for the players trying to figure out how to get stuff from A to B. The whole thing was, to quote Peter, "slicker" and I'd go along with that. There were other changes, pretty much all of which seemed to work, and the traditional post-game discussion came up with potential solutions to the few that didn't. This is the type of game that needs to be played to a conclusion quickly. Grids help, the 'slicker' turning and moving help a bit more, and what would really top it off is if the ships sank or surrendered a bit sooner.

The initiative rules have ended up as somewhat of a hybrid between classic Piquet and its derivative, FoB. It includes, I think by chance, the latter's mechanism for potentially interrupting one side's long runs of initiative by a short burst of activity from the other side. I seem to remember that we've tried that combination before, and I was reminded last night of its merits. For what it's worth I vote for all 'Dress the Lines' to become 'Lulls'. While on that subject, the deck for 'Fleet of Battle' - that's what the rules are called - contains one card whose name is frankly impossible to pronounce, to the extent that I mentally think of it as the 'She Sells Seashells' card. I need some help from this chap:

Plures Nugas Vitae

 There was some galley action last night, more than five years after they last hit the table, or possibly just since they last hit the table while I was both there and bothered to write about them.

Mine are the three ships marked with a 6. The one on the left has rammed and sunk the wreck; the one in the centre has rammed its target to no effect, has lost its ram (that's the pink bead) and is entangled; the one on the right tried to rake its target, failed and is entangled. Believe it or not, this was the absolute high point for the Carthaginians. No sooner had our other squadrons of ships entered the fight than they were either boarded or rammed, or occasionally both. The rules? Well, they possibly need some work. 

Having opened the book on Edward the Exile mentioned yesterday, I have inevitably been reading it. I'd forgotten how full it was of all sorts of interesting digressions - such as how the son of the Doge of Venice came to be King of Hungary - but it also has some sections which seem strangely relevant to the zeitgiest. For example:

"The democratic Kievan period upon which the Russians now look back with nostalgic yearning began with the coming of the Viking Varangians in the ninth century and ended in the holocaust of the Mongol invasion in the middle of the thirteenth century. Kiev's leading role was taken over by Moscow whose princes borrowed the tools of statecraft from the tyrannical Mongol system."

North Cape 1943

The dull roots of face-to-face wargaming could soon be stirred by the spring rain of antibodies in the bloodstream; or, equally possibly, June may turn out to be the cruellest month. While we wait, the warm weather has meant that there has been nothing happening in the annexe. The newly expanded and manned fort still awaits the attacking force to form up outside it. I have however read another book.

The Imperial War Museum recently posted a short video on their YouTube channel about the sinking of the Scharnhorst, which understandably enough focussed on the role played by HMS Belfast. I didn't previously know much (anything at all really) about the action and a quick search showed that Osprey had published a book written by Angus Konstam on the subject late last year. The standard Osprey format actually suits WWII naval battles rather well: there are a limited number of participants doing a finite number of things over a short period, and the reader doesn't end up feeling that important information has had to be omitted for the sake of space.

I found it a good read and can recommend it should anyone else find themselves suddenly struck by this fairly niche interest. It is lavishly illustrated, as you would expect, with illustrations, photographs and maps. Regarding the last, I suffered my usual confusion when studying them, but strongly suspect that is due to my well-known problems with spatial awareness rather than any inherent fault in the book. The usual proof-reading problems that plague books on military history are present, but in a fairly small way. The Royal Navy divided the ships involved in the operation into two groups, rather imaginatively designated Force 1 and Force 2. On a number of occasions the text reads Force 1 when from the context it is quite clearly referring to Force 2; so clearly in fact that it doesn't present any real problems. And you would have thought that someone involved in the book's production would have known the difference between a baron and a baronet.

Sinking Force Z

 I have been reading 'Sinking Force Z 1941', a recent release from Osprey. It was written by Angus Konstam, who as well as being a prolific author on a variety of subjects - I think the last of his books I read was on the Barbary Pirates - was also the winner of the largest wargame in which I have ever played. My interest in the events covered is mainly because my uncle was present as a crew member of one of the escorting destroyers.

Although understandably focussed on the events from December 8th to 10th 1941, it also provides extensive background on how and why Force Z came to be there, and on the design and capabilities of both the Royal Navy ships involved and the Japanese bombers which attacked them. There are lavish illustrations, by Adam Tooby, and plenty of maps, diagrams and photographs. It could possibly have done with another run through by a proof reader, but overall is an impressive publication.

It forms part of Osprey's 'Air Campaign' series, and the central premise is that it marks the point that naval supremacy definitively switched from battleship to aircraft carrier. Indeed the subtitle is 'The day the Imperial Japanese Navy killed the battleship'. The argument is well made, and it was apparently the first time that more than one capital ship had been sunk at sea by aircraft alone, although as so often with history one wonders about the counterfactuals. In any event, the battleship's time had at least begun to run out by then.

There was one other interesting point for me. I knew that Pearl Harbor took place on December 7th and the invasion of Malaya on December 8th. What I had never appreciated was that events in Malaya started an hour before those in Hawaii. The explanation is, of course, the International Date Line, which, despite me being renowned for my expertise on the rotation of the earth, is something that it had never occurred to me to consider before. I feel foolish.

Beyond the Smoke

"H.M.S. Electra attacked through the smoke, and was seen no more..."

 -    From the first communiqué of the Battle of the Java Sea, February 1942

'Terse, though moving' is how that epitaph is described on the dust jacket of H.M.S. Electra, a monograph on the ship by the most senior officer to survive its sinking. The words have an additional resonance for me, because I can hear my mother saying them. The death of her elder brother during the war wasn't spoken about much at home, but I can remember once asking her what she knew about it and that's pretty much what she said: "They went through the smoke and no one ever saw them again". At the time of course, I didn't know where the phrase came from.

My recent involvement in helping someone to learn the details of her godfather's crash into, and rescue from, the North Sea got me thinking about all the stories that were lost because the generation who fought the war preferred not to speak of them, a train of thought which led inevitably perhaps to the uncle I never knew. A little bit of research led me a book of whose existence I was previously unaware, certainly none of my rather large family ever mentioned it. My one remaining aunt is very old and lives on the other side of the world; I doubt that I shall trouble her with the subject. The style of Lieutenant-Commander Cain's book is somewhat dated - much of which is presumably due to ghost writer A.V Sellwood; although the latter was a distinguished naval correspondent, back in the days when there was a navy big enough to warrant such things, and I think we can rely on the accuracy of the background colour - but it's a fascinating, sobering story.

I don't know when my uncle joined the ship except that it must have been before it made its final trip to the Far East, but Electra, an E-class destroyer, had an astonishing two years or so of involvement in the war. Within hours of the outbreak of hostilities she was first on the scene following the sinking with no warning of the Athenia, a liner with over a thousand civilian passengers on board and the first British ship to be lost. She escorted Ark Royal during the carrier's operations against the German invasion of Norway. She was the ship that picked up the only three survivors from H.M.S. Hood's crew of 1,400; Cain is especially good on the ten minute period between the excitement of receiving Hood's signal: "Enemy in sight. Am engaging.", and the shock following that from the Prince of Wales: "Hood sunk". Electra was senior escort on the first arctic convoy following Hitler's invasion of Russia, but was spared further such trips when, and this is still prior to Pearl Harbour, she was ordered to Singapore. She was with the Repulse and Prince of Wales when they were sunk by Japanese aircraft, left Singapore as the Japanese crossed the causeway and then formed part of the Allied (Dutch, British, US) fleet essentially wiped out over the three days of 27th February to 1st March trying to head of the invasion fleet heading for Java.

Cain's description of the battle itself is brief, and his summary of the Electra's solo, and suicidal, attack on the whole Japanese fleet in order to buy some time for the stricken cruiser Exeter is a phlegmatic as one would expect. In his eyes, and one suspects also of all his crewmates, they were simply doing what had to be done. His account of his escape, rescue, and subsequent sinking again are longer, but he understandably declines to speak at all of his years as a Japanese PoW.

So, a fascinating and, for me especially, somewhat emotional read. I feel very grateful that in this case someone took the time to document their memories. A less happy postscript is that the Electra is one of the ships which despite being designated war graves have been badly damaged by illegal salvagers recovering scrap metal.

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Galley Battles

We finished refighting Actium last night, or to be more accurate we decided that we didn't want to carry on any further. As I said when I posted about the first night's play I have a nostalgic fondness for a bit of galley action, so it's disappointing to have to report that I didn't really enjoy this game.

On the plus side, I am more convinced than ever that hexes work very effectively for a game that is basically about manoeuvre and contact. A less clear cut question is the use of two hexes per ship rather than one as in the original paper and cardboard version. On balance I think it makes sense - beyond the obvious physical constraints of the size of the models - because not only are ships longer than they are wide, but they also move forwards so during whatever time period is meant to be represented by a turn their path should be harder to cross in a perpendicular manner than it is to avoid them head on.

The command and control also worked reasonably well. I like the random nature of squadron activation including the use of jokers. It may be that further friction could be introduced by adding more tokens to the bag. We didn't really use the double activation option much, so I'll reserve judgement on that.

So what doesn't work? I'm afraid I have a bit of a list:

• Visual differentiation between ships: This might just be me, but beyond the obvious fact that some are bigger than others I really can't tell the difference between them let alone which ones have towers and engines and which ones don't. The knock on effect of this is just to make every other aspect of the game - moving, shooting, ramming, raking, boarding - painful to calculate. Funnily enough it's very easy to identify crew quality even though crews aren't modelled at all.
• Shooting: There is far too much of it, and it's far too complicated.
• Burning: Seems much too easy to set ships on fire and then ships sink very quickly while on fire.
• Grappling: This seems very difficult to do, although there was a view that I was just rolling badly. In common with everything else in this game, it's somewhat complicated.
• Boarding: Calculation of casualties is more complex than it needs to be. I also don't understand why it isn't possible to split marines between the original ship and the captured ship, especially as one can split the fire of marines on the same ship between different targets, thereby increasing the complexity if that exercise even further.

James has already made some suggested changes with which he intends to finish off the game solo. These are intended above all to simplify shooting and reduce the number of ships sinking because of burning. Personally I'd go for a bucket of dice approach and get rid of all the tables; the game it most resembles on the table is actually X-Wing, and it works there. Interestingly he has also taken the view that a floating ship is more likely to be able to keep a sinking ship afloat than a sunk wreck is to be able to drag down a floating ship. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. Perhaps what is actually needed is a quantum approach, a sort of Schrodinger's galley, whereby one doesn't know whether a fouled ramming ship has sunk until it disengages.

Call to me all my sad captains

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description; she did lie
In her pavilion,--cloth-of-gold of tissue,--
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature; on each side her
Stood pretty-dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.

                      - Antony and Cleopatra Act 2 Scene 2

Thus it is that Shakespeare describes Cleopatra's favoured means of water borne transportation. Sadly despite James' renowned modelling skills all he did was take one of his galleys and stick a bit of cardboard on the back saying 'Cleopatra'; rather prosaic I felt. The bard may have been OK at the poetry ["May have?"], but he was as careless of the historical accuracy of his description of the final naval showdown between Octavian and Antony as he was about many battles. However, he was right in his judgement that Antony in becoming a "strumpet's fool" had lost the plot somewhat. It is only fitting therefore that he should be represented in the refight of Actium by moi, a man whose complete lack of spatial awareness accurately reflects - through the medium of the rules - the man's shortcomings as an admiral. Woe, woe and thrice woe.

Having said that, I am - as things stand after one evening's play - winning, entirely due to my success at setting Caesar's ships on fire (1). I have consequently warmed to the rules somewhat. It was noticeable that we had a lot less successful raking than in the previous game and I think this was simply a reversion to the mean. I suspect a similar statistical anomaly in the 'going on fire' situation and am not sure whether a rule change is particularly required. A large ship with a full complement of marines will cause a fire test approximately half the times it shoots, more if it is targeting smaller ships. Of those half will catch fire, and of those that do half will sink. So a large ship will cause a sinking by shooting - with an uncertain time delay - say one in six times. It can fire twice a turn and a game will last five or six turns, during which time smaller ships can easily out manoeuvre it to keep their distance.

I like playing galley actions for nostalgic reasons as much as anything else. In my teens Len the Ink, one of my early wargaming buddies, and I made 2D fleets from black paper and fought actions on the living room floor. Despite knowing little about the historical reality (I still don't) what we did then seems pretty similar to what we're doing now; the big improvement is the use of the hex grid. I'm not sure what prompted our interest then, although watching Ben Hur at Christmas would probably be a good guess. What we knew about Roman history often came from the television:

(1) I have discovered why I don't remember setting so many ships aflame before. Apparently our previous game was a scenario from the Punic Wars, a time in history when the idea that fire was detrimental to wooden galleys had not occurred to anyone.

So row well, and live

A little over a year ago we tried out Richard H. Berg's 'War Galley' rules; details of our lack of success can be found here and here. Osprey have recently published a set of ancient naval rules and James has managed to blag a copy. The obvious thing therefore was to get the galleys out and, well, have another crack at 'War Galley'. Last night was a bit of a much needed refresher in the rules and a chance to learn the inevitable changes that James had introduced. These fell into two main categories: command and control, where he had opted for a sort of Two Fat Lardies lite squadron activation process; and fatigue, which has been simplified enormously.

A chap with a beard is simply fatigued

 It went smoothly enough - if you allow for the fact that we kept getting the rules wrong - and we shall hopefully have a more polished proper game next week. It's a bloody affair with ships sinking very easily. There was also far more going on fire than I remember from before.

Should have rolled a 1,2 or 3

I can't say that I've changed my opinion much. I think that hexes - or at least grids - are ideal for galleys; I think that these particular rules are rather complicated with their many different categories of movement restriction - fatigued, half-speed, raked, crippled and so on; and I think too much rides on the luck of getting first strike when within ramming distance. So, it's a completely open-minded approach from me then.

Sunk without trace

"My wife was immature. I'd be in my bath and she'd come in and sink my boats." - Woody Allen

We convened at James' last night for some more galley action and were joined for the first time by Paul, an experienced wargamer who has just moved into the area and who we had made contact with at the Derby show. Sad to say he clearly didn't enjoy his first game in the legendary wargames room, but frankly I could see where he was coming from.

James had translated the War Galley board game to the tabletop and there were certain immediate improvements on top of the obvious aesthetic one. The ships, being metal, stayed where they were supposed to be, and with his usual assiduity he had made any number of markers. The only cardboard tokens remaining were the little chits for the squadron commanders and so the problem of small printing and old eyes had also disappeared. However, the complexity remained.

As readers will know we often play Piquet, which is a reasonably involved set of rules. At any particular point a unit could have markers defining quality, losses, morale status, command status, whether it was loaded, whether it had fired at all, whether it had acted on the current card and probably others I have forgotten (Interestingly, this isn't the bit about Piquet that people complain about; it's always the command and control rules.). So I'm used to relatively complicated games. But for some reason this game seems to have a very high ratio of faffing about to the amount of fun generated. And, ironically perhaps given my own acceptance of the swings of initiative in Piquet, it seemed to me that the whole game would probably hinge on who won the initiative on the first turn when the fleets had closed to ramming distance; in other words, on one die roll.

There was a further issue which bothered Paul, who had neither played the board game nor read the rules before, and which on reflection I think was a perfectly valid point, possibly obscured to those of us who had played with paper and cardboard. In that version the ship tokens fill the hexes, meaning that the eye automatically accepts the rule that ships cannot pass through a hex containing another ship. Except, of course, when they can. There is a special diekplous rule that allows pass through of fleets facing each other head on under certain conditions. The rule is justified with reference to the actual tactic of the same name employed by the Greeks, but a moment's reflection will tell you that the real reason is that without it the game is broken. If both players deployed their ships in close packed lines of adjacent hexes then nothing could or would ever happen. On the tabletop the ships do not fill the hexes, and the space to either side gives some visual explanation as to how the diekplous would have worked. However, it also raises all sorts of expectations that interpenetration ought to be possible under other, less restricted circumstances. When Paul made his point, the best justification that the rest of us could come up with was that it was what the rules said; rather unsatisfactory I'm sure we'd all agree.

So, points to reflect on:

• These rules are not a hit with me as they stand
• Having said that I still think hexes are definitely the way to go for galley warfare
• As James himself pointed out, now the hexes are on the table they'd work well for WW1 aerial games
• I hope that Paul rejoins us for a game more to his taste; some FoB Punic Wars perhaps.

War Galley

It's been a long time since I played a hex-wargame on a paper mat with cardboard counters, and last night I realised why. It's fiddly, complicated and the markings on the pieces are difficult to read. However, there were enough positives from the game of War Galley to think that it might translate effectively to the tabeltop with models. In particular, I am convinced that hexes are the appropriate medium for rules involving ramming, raking, grappling and so on. It just makes crystal clear what actions are permitted and what aren't.

What was less than crystal clear was the prose in which the rules were written. Richard H. Berg (not to be confused with the Richard Borg who wrote Memoir '44, which I played the previous day) may be prolific, but it hasn't made what he writes easier to understand. In fact it may be part of the problem because there could perhaps be an assumption that one has played other games and is familiar with some of the conventions.

The game is part of the Great Battles of History [GBoH] series. Let me quote from the blurb on Boradgamegeek: "What is best about War Galley is how easy it is to play -- the rules are about half the length of the usual GBoH game -- and that means that most battles can be complete in several hours, at the most". Only several hours; sounds tempting. In the event our game lasted much less time as all my galleys got sunk. Games that rely on spatial awareness are really not my forte.

We had played the whole game getting the rules for failed ram attempts completely wrong and that may have altered the flow of the battle, although not I suspect the eventual outcome. We eschewed missile fire in this test run and every grappling attempt failed - another thing that may have changed if we'd played the ramming rules correctly - so there was no boarding. Also the command and control element seems a bit clunky. But as mentioned above they seem to have passed the first test and will now be tried in a second test on the table using some cobbled together hybrid of models and cardboard counters.

Ecnomus

I finally got to play with James' Punic War naval toys this week. We refought the battle of Ecnomus that James and Peter had played the previous week. I was the Romans and was tasked with reversing the heavy defeat that James had led them to. I didn't.

I did, however, thoroughly enjoy myself. In my formative wargaming days we played a lot of ancient galley battles with paper cut outs on the floor and I've always had a soft spot for it. I had, sort of, got a grip on the rules by the end and would play things slightly differently next time around. However, they provided what Piquet games usually do, an interesting game that could easily have gone the other way had the cards played out differently.

Readers will be pleased to note that the equatorial length of day was only briefly mentioned. There was some debate about the correct plural of the Latin word 'corvus', but in my opinion this lacks substance as the cause for debate because there is a correct answer that can easily be determined. Far more promising was the discussion as to how that plural might be pronounced. Given that Roman pronunciation is intrinsically unknowable I can see a great future for that particular discussion.

The Swedish Women's Volleyball Team