Galleys In The Gong

Caesar and I planned to play Galleys & Galleons at the club yesterday, and were joined by two players new to the game, Darren and Colin. Fortunately I'd arranged a large game, so it could easily accommodate four players.

I set up an ancient naval battle, between Carthage (blue labels) and Syracuse (red labels). Both sides were given four triremes, four quadremes, four quinqueremes, two quinquereme flagships and a hexareme flagship. Stats were as per the rules, aside from the quadremes, which I simply rated as Q3 C3 with Ramming, dropping the Reinforced Hull and Veteran NCO traits, as they create weird anomalies in terms of points and combat capabilities relative to the other ship types.

Both sides were free to divide their ships up into three commands in any way they saw fit, under control of the flagships. Carthage (Caesar and Darren) simply created a command of each type, with the hexareme leading the quinquereme command. As the Syracusans Colin and I adopted a similar approach, except that we added a trireme to our quadreme force.

I set up a semi-random terrain (I threw islands at the table), and then we diced for sides, with the high roller getting to choose where they set up and the other side setting up opposite. We ended up with two islands on our right flank whilst Carthage had their force split by a small island.

Here's the setup from behind the Syracusan fleet. On our left were the quadremes, faced by the Carthaginian triremes. We had our quinqueremes in the centre, and our small triremes command was set up by the islands, because their shallow draft allowed them to easily navigate the area around the terrain. Carthage placed their quinqueremes to the fore on their left-centre, with the quadremes behind them.

The initial advances came on our left, as Caesar pushed forward his triremes and we responded with a rapid advance from the quadremes. Syracuse scored the first hit of the game with a lucky long-range artillery shot.

The Carthaginians attacked boldly and, thanks to the vagaries of the initiative cards, took early control of the left flank, ramming and badly damaging a number of the Syracusan vessels.

The Syracusans fought back, sinking one Carthaginian trireme, and boarding two other. This flank was already shaping up to be a bloody fight.

In the centre the two Carthaginian commands were swinging across to pass between the islands. The Syracusans lined up their quinqueremes to harass them with artillery fire as they advanced and turned. Meanwhile Colin sent our triremes around their flank, with their first attack crippling a Carthaginian quadreme.

Keeping the game running meant that I didn't get to take many photos. But here's a shot from around midway through the battle. On the left  the Carthaginian flagship is under attack. We had held off ramming with the Syracusan quinquiremes and were using artillery to damage the Carthaginians as they advanced. To the right of the picture our triremes were moving up on he Carthaginian flank. At this stage were were ahead on 'kills'.

The flagship of the Carthaginian right had struck, but a quadreme was now attacking the victorious Syracusan vessels.

After a couple of hours play we decided to call the current turn the last one. The Syracusans were two ships up in terms of casualties, having sunk or forced to surrender six Carthaginian ships with only four losses. But on the last bound the Syracusan left-flank saw a minor disaster; one ship sank after colliding with a wreck leaving the command's flagship isolated. A bad roll saw it strike, and even the score.

When we finished the action in the centre was still going strong, although both sides had ships that were close to being lost and forcing a final victory (we set eight ships as the breakpoint for each fleet). In this picture the Syracusans had finally pushed forward and were attacking the Carthaginian hexareme, with some success.

This was an intense and bloody fight, with an interesting mix of ships. It was nice to see that, despite the temptation to ram, both sides were happy to spend some of the action standing off from the enemy and bombarding them in order to soften them up. Although we finished before a final victory, were were fairly close, and the game moved quickly given that two players had never played before. All in all it was a good evening's gaming.