I spent this past Saturday over at Rob's place, playing a few boardgames, and although I didn't take any detailed reports (or many pictures), here's a few details of what I did.
To start off, we played Close Action, by Clash of Arms games. Since Rob had never played before, we chose to play one of the more basic scenarios- 'Dont Give Up the Ship: Chesapeake vs. Shannon'. This is a fairly well known engagement from the War of 1812 that historically resulted in the USS Chesapeake being captured by the British. I was playing the Chesapeake in this battle, but to keep things even for us, we played with the optional rule giving the US ships a Crew Quality of A3 (vs B4), making it a little more effective, and turning this into a fairly even matchup.
As mentioned, I didn't take copious notes of the battle, but I managed to hit Rob's ship hard on turns 7-10 (raking him from the front on 10), nearly knocking out 2 whole hull sections, and taking significant rigging losses in return. On turn 14, I managed to rake him from the front again, bringing him close to striking, and we called it.
I imagine this will be a far more interesting picture when we actually play a game with more ships, haha.
Really, I don't think I tremendously outplayed Rob, although I did outguess him once or twice (and got outguessed once). Rob had to tack on Turn 7 to keep me somewhat engaged, and I think that probably hurt him a bit more than it felt like at the time (keep in mind the damage I did on the subsequent turns, which was relatively light in return).
We followed this up by playing Warriors of God, from MMP. We chose the scenario 'Lion in Winter', covering the period from 1135-1258 AD. I played as the English. The end result of this game was that I basically had two very successful turns, ending with Rob moving in a large army to clear out the English from Normandy, thinking I would let him siege me, but instead engaging him in combat, and crushing his army badly. With much of his army destroyed, no ability to get his guys out of Wales/Scotland to support the mainland quickly, and the fact I was unopposed on over half the map for a few turns, we called it in my favor, and went to play some non-wargames for a bit.
This is a picture from the turn after I destroyed his main army. For now, the big thing to see is that there isn't a whole lot of blue on the table:
So yeah, a few games, but we had a great time, and the best news is that I've finally been getting wargames on the table :).
Till next time!
Did have a great time. Really liked Close Action. It did remind me a lot of Wooden Ships and Iron Men. Which is a great thing! Thought LOTR was amazingly fun, and I thought we had it. Agggh! Next time.
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