Black Seas

Last night Ralph put on a learning game of Black Seas for a group of people. Although I've played it before, it's only been a couple of times, and I still don't really have a handle on the game, so I sat in on it.

We played a couple of scenarios from the book. In the first each side had three frigates approaching each other with the aim of trying to get one of their number off the opposite side of the table.

We had three French frigates on the right and three Spanish on the right. All ships had regular crews; we weren't doing anything complicated.

Both lines rushed at each other and exchanged broadsides as we passed.

Brian's ship tried to tack and, due to the rather strange tacking rules, caught fire instead. Either we misunderstood the rules, or they are very strange rules indeed.

One of the Spaniards made it off the table, ending the game.

We set up a standard pitched battle with three 74 each next. We French did manage to get our ships into a line, but it was sailing downwind towards the impervious horrors of a lee-shore.

A rake that wasn't. Unless you're using the Fire As She Bears rules (which we weren't) it's really hard to set up a rake. But it was irrelevant anyway. The two lead French ships just ran straight into the rocks and only mine turned away, simply to be shot up by the Spanish instead.

Granted I think I've only ever played Black Seas with the most basic of rules, but I really can't bring myself to like the game. I'm not sure what it is about it, but for all its marketing and pretty models it just simply doesn't seem to cut it as a set of rules. I confess a big turn-off for me was the realisation that the process of sailing ships in a line, which would seem to be a standard feature of any game set in this period, has to be covered by a specific rules exception, because the initiative process - ships closest to the wind move first - makes it otherwise impossible.  To me that just seems to be untidy rules-writing. The fact that we had a ship catch fire because it failed to tack just added to the general absurdity. 

I don't know. Black Seas seems popular. What am I missing? Or is it all hype, marketing and the fact that enough people play it that if you don't then you don't get a game?

Thanks to Ralph and Bryan for providing the models, and to Ralph for navigating us through the game.

Anyway, as a treat I took along some of these - ships's biscuit. I made them myself, following the recipe in teh Aubrey/Maturin cookbook, 'Lobscouse and Spotted Dog'. But you'll probably hear more about that in a future post.

I don't think anyone was a big fan of them. You could survive on them if you had to, but they're hard work.

52 Games - Game 53