Blockade Run In The East Indies

I've been trying out a couple of changes to the Galleys & Galleons rules over the past few games, and took some photos of one of them; a Blockade Run scenario featuring a Portuguese carrack trying to get past a couple of Dutch cromsters. The Dutch were assisted by a fort belonging to an unreliable allied local potentate.

All ships were lifted straight from the book, but the carrack had the Charismatic trait (to represent a particularly cunning captain), whilst the fort was Q4 C4 with Bastion and Treacherous. The latter trait meant that, under certain circumstances, it could change sides.

Here's the setup, with the fort on an island in the centre of the table and the Dutch covering both routes around it.

The carrack.

A cromster and the fort.

The Portuguese decided to go south of the island, as this offered the clearest route and allowed them to stay as far from the fort as possible.

A good start for the Portuguese as a long-range broadside managed to damage and hole one of the cromsters.

The other cromster inflicted some superficial damage on the Portuguese ship. This is one of the changes I'm looking at and which I'll detail below.

The fort opened fire, but with no effect.

In trying to run past the Dutch ship, though, the Portuguese vessel had strayed too close to the island and didn't turn away from the shallows in time. It took a fair bit of damage thanks to this error.

However despite having the carrack at its mercy the local potentate decided to switch sides instead (the double one for activation causes this)

The Dutch now carefully skirted the fort, although it seemed content not to fire.

The wind had shifted to the north by now, which meant that the carrack would have to tack, slowly and ponderously, to safety. The Dutch ships closed in swiftly.

Caught in irons the captain of the carrack was content to try and fight it out until the wind shifted into a more favourable position. The Dutch took another hit.

But the Portuguese crew didn't like the idea of being outnumbered two to one in a cannonade, and forced their captain to strike his colours.

I played this through again with different terrain setups, and the Portuguese ship failed to escape every time. But it's fun trying.

On to the rules changes. 

The first is one I've been playing with for a little while - Knotting and Splicing. For one action a ship may ignore a single rigging critical for the remainder of the activation. This means that it can, for example, ignore part of the reduced movement effect for sails or oars, or the inability to change speed on a steam-vessel. The critical isn't removed; it's simply ignored.

(A rigging critical can be a real game-changer and can pretty much end some scenarios if a ship is no longer able to move into half of the points of the compass. This change allows a ship to circumvent the hit, but at the cost of some of its effectiveness. I did briefly try allowing a ship to repair criticals, but that was too strong a change. Ignoring a critical on a temporary basis works much better.)

The second change deals with a small niggle I have with the gunnery rules. If a ship fires and beats the opposing vessel's roll, but their dice score was odd, then they score no damage. Whilst I can see the purpose behind this - if it scored damage then it actually makes gunnery overly effective - it does feel like the player is being cheated out of a winning score. They ought to get something for it. So if you beat the target's score, but your die roll is an odd number, then you place a superficial damage marker on the target. The next time any ship fires at a ship with a superficial damage marker, the marker is removed, but the firing ship gets a +1 to their roll.

(Basically an odd roll doesn't score any damage, but makes it slightly easier for the next shot to score damage. Note that this could still result in a superficial damage marker being placed, but that's the fortune of war for you. A ship can never have more than one superficial damage marker, because each time it is shot at the marker it has is removed to give the +1.)