Triremes In Action - Again

I played a quick game of Galleys & Galleons yesterday using my scratchbuilt triremes. I just ran them as 'vanilla' ships this time - C3 Q3 - Galley, Ramming, Shallow Draft, Yare - and gave each side six. The 'Athenians' were in blue, their allies in green, the 'Spartans' in red and their allies in yellow.

The main reason for playing was to see how putting the ships on bases improved determining whether a vessel from being rammed in the front or side. It did. Whilst running the models baseless looks better, I found that there were a few grey areas when determining the direction of attack. Since there are modifiers and game effect dependent on knowing it, I wanted it to be unambiguous.

Anyway, here are the Athenians moving up.

The Spartans made heavy work of negotiating the islands in their deployment area.

Two galleys from each side got ahead of the others. They exchanged missile fire, but neither was able to line up a ram on the other.

The green galley quickly scooted ahead as more Spartan ships closed in on it. Meanwhile the rest of the Athenian fleet worked its way around the central island.

The Athenian allies smashed into the Spartan galleys, forcing one to surrender.

The height of the battle. In the straits between the three islands the Athenian allies fight the Spartan galleys, whilst the Athenians work their way into the action. At the bottom of the picture are Sparta's ally galleys.

The Spartan allies moved swiftly into action, severely damaging an Athenian ship.

They pushed into the straits, sweeping all before them.

The Athenians were caught facing the wrong way as the Spartan allies wrought havoc on the,

The battle was a Spartan victory, mostly brought about by the final attack of their allies in the yellow galleys.

I'm enjoying these games, although ramming is an incredibly random tactic in this game. The activation rules do make for some interesting decisions, especially since galleys need activations in order to move. Ships are often left exposed to attack because other ships cause a turnover trying to get into the action or achieve an objective. The wonderful All At Sea table produced one horror in this game - an Athenian galley ran itself into a rocky island after failing a roll on a damage dice, resulting in some garbled order.

I hope to have the more nimble biremes ready for the next game.