Sails of Glory Arrives in Port

Last year the creators of Wings of Glory announced that they were going to launch a naval version, based around the Napoleonic Wars. I love naval wargaming going back to my days of playing Harpoon in the early ‘90s through to Dystopian Wars these days, so Sails of Glory sounded like it could tick all the boxes for me.

The game itself comes with a pile of tokens, four pre-painted ships, some card terrain, rulers etc and a nice full colour rulebook. I’ve read the basic rules and they seem straight forward enough, although it will no doubt take another couple of readings (taking 5-10 minutes so not a huge effort) and a couple of games before I can confirm either way. I am a little put off by the vast number of tokens from a setup and take down perspective (one of my bugbears with X-Wing) but a little organisation coupled with the bags that came with the Kickstarter version of the game will (presumably) alleviate these issues.

The most important thing to me though was the quality of the ships. Based on Ares Games track record I knew that they could make cards and tokens etc and I was confident that they could come up with a fun set of rules, but pre-painted ships without the backing and help of FFG was another thing. Well I can say that I am very impressed with their efforts and they are in fact a step ahead of what I expected. The paint jobs are not perfect and most gamers could do something better with some effort, however the key here is that just like the ships in X-Wing they are pre-painted and to a level where you do not need to do anything to them and still feel that you got a premium product at a good price.

Hopefully later this week a couple of us will manage to get in a lunch time game and we can see how it works.

Britain and Sweden Go To War!

Over the weekend Wayne and I managed to get together for a game of Napoleon at War – a fun set of Napoleonics rules made by a small Spanish company. The rules themselves feel like they have a bit of a Flames Of War influence and are quite fast. Evan and the Palmerston North guys play them a lot and have nothing but good things to say about them (okay, they have a few not so good things to say, but more about that later).

 

I dusted off an old British army that I am in the process of giving a little bit of a tidy up, whilst Wayne brought his Swedes. We had pretty similar forces with a few Brigades of infantry, a Squadron of Cavalry in reserve and some artillery (Wayne had 3 Batteries to my 2, as well as an extra gun in one).

We both deployed centrally, with our reserves to fill in the flanks. The short version of the game is that I managed to grind out in the centre, where my infantry battalions shot the Swedes off the table, but on my left flank Wayne’s extra artillery battery took out my 95^th Rifles and Portugese Cacadores, allowing him to start enveloping me. On the right flank my Cavalry came flying on, only the fail in a series of tests resulting in them standing around in front of another artillery battery. Eventually they got their act together and overran the guns and some of his Cav, but the damage was done and Wayne won the right flank. At that point we called then game a win to the Swedes, a very close win, but a win none the less…

 

The game was fun but one of the biggest frustrations was referencing the rulebook during the game (this being the main complaint that I’ve heard from players) and finding rules at the right time. We’ve downloaded the FAQ and are planning on having another go soon, in the meantime we are both going to need to read the rulebook another couple of times to try and get it to sink in!

Holding the Centre

British Cav sitting in front of the Swedish guns

Before finally getting it together and breaking the Swedish lines

July is Prussian Month

With so many open projects, either barely started or almost complete I thought it might be fun to focus on two for the month and try to finish one, my Prussian Fleet for Dystopian Wars as well as getting a new one underway, my Prussian Army for Napoleon at War.

Dystopian Wars 101

DW is a Victorian era steampunk game (specifically in 1870) by Spartan Games. In their timeline the Industrial Revolution happened decades before our own so there is a wide variety of very advanced technologies as well as a lot of recognisable ones. There are two major aspects to the game in so far as you can play a land based or sea based game (or a combination of the two). We chose to get in to the sea game, largely because if we wanted to push tanks around we have Flames Of War...

Dystopian War 1.1 Rulebook

The game mechanics are pretty straight forward and quite fun. Basically you need a good number of D6, 6's are good and let you roll more dice. Don't let this comment fool you, it is not just a dice game as careful use of your resources are required - you don't waste a Battleship hunting down Destroyers. The rules also received a tidy up recently and so 1.1 of the Master Rulebook is now available, there is also an expansion coming out right about now.

Victor, Sean, Mike and I each bought a starter fleet, I of course found myself enticed by a number of extra models that were released early for the Prussian Fleet. The models are wonderful... they have been digitally designed and then rapid prototyped. This has left horizontal lines that are quite faint on the ships from the printing process. I choose to see those as just another part of the model rather than going insane trying to clean them off. Plus once the models are painted and on the table you will not notice them. For once I managed to get a bit of a headstart on the rest of the guys and got some ships finished off, however this lead me to being rather over confident and more ships were purchased. Now I find myself with a fairly large Prussian Fleet (as well as some great islands and buildings) that now need painting - hopefully over the course of this month...

Prussian vessels ready for undercoating

Napoleon at War 101

Napoleon at War is basically what it says on the book - a Napoleonic Game (think early 1800s and lots of guys with muskets and colourful uniforms, by a Spanish company called Man at War. I've read through the rules once and will be having a game against Wayne and Mike in the next couple of weeks. Based on that one read through I am very excited, so much so I went out and bought and entire 15/18mm Prussian army from AB Figures from Nic over at Eureka. 

Napoleon at War Rulebook

The rules are very Flames Of War-esque in that they are fun, don't spend too much time dealing with the minutia and look as though they will produce a fun result in a couple of hours. All of which are big wins as far as I am concerned. Each foot unit has 6 bases with 4 figures, the bases are about the same size as a FOW small base. Cavalry and guns each go on larger bases, and in the case of cav are 3 to a base. They even follow their own version of 3+/4+/5+ for motivation and and skill - called valeur and discipline.

They are let down a little by the fact that the Spanish to English translation can be a little tough to follow at times, but you take the good, you take the bad and there you have, a Napoleonic set of rules that looks fun...

In terms of the number of figures you need to paint it is the same as pretty much any Nappies set of rules. My estimate is approx 250-300 infantry and 50 cav, plus some guns. Basically a similar number of figures to a Soviet army for FOW, but with much more interesting uniforms. 

I have sucessfully painted up one (yes that is right... one!) test figure to get my colours sorted out. The version pictured below is not quite right - I have since changed the jacket colour to be a much darker blue and painted the mess tin on his back silver (thanks Wayne!). It looks a little rough in the photo but for a 15/18mm figure I am exceptionally happy with how it turned out. Now I just need to paint 23 more to have my first unit done!

Prussian Musketeer Test Figure (front)

Prussian Musketeer Test Figure (back)

Zee Plan!

So, what is the plan for Prussian Month. Not entirely sure if I am being perfectly honest... but I am going to set myself a "reach goal" whereby I set an impossibly hard target and when I fall short I will have hopefully achieved more than if I set myself an easy one.

Dystopian Wars: Finish everything that is in the photo (above) plus another 3 ships not pictured, and finish off all of the islands I have (which I also need to find as I am not sure where I put them after my last tidy up). I will not worry about painting the buildings as I have a plan for them which requires me to buy two more islands.

Napoleon at War: Paint one entire Infantry Regiment. That is 3x 24 figures (two Muskeeter Batalions and 1 Fusilier Batalion), plus another 3x 4 figures (for the skirmishers).

Sounds hard.... maybe I should go and start work on them rather than playing World of Tanks... I'll update my progress next week.