Ships and Boats for Colonial-era Gaming

Below, are photos of some vessels which have plied Ouargi rivers and coasts. Click on the pictures for close-up views, pictures of similar vessels, and construction notes.

Steam Launches Click for closeup views, other vessels and information.

Dhows Click for closeup views and information.

River Gunboat Click for a larger view, historical illustrations and construction information.

River Steamers Click for closeup views and information.

The Ironclad Click for closeup views, historical photos and information.

Far-Eastern Junks Click for closeup views, historical photos and information.

Miscellaneous Craft Rowboats, Canoes and Sub-marine Terror Weapons. Click for more photos and information.

Since we cannot make it realistic, we have to settle for making it visually appealing and useful as a game element. We can do the first by exaggerating the vertical dimension and turning the model (toy, actually) into a cartoon representation of a generalized 19th century warship, and the second by keeping it as small as possible without seeming totally ridiculous. In fact, the model is only 9" long and 2.75" wide; each turret can barely contain three figures, let alone two naval guns and their crews. Yet it can happily steam back and forth on a 6" strip of blue paper along the edge of the gaming table, provide artillery support, land marines, look roughly proportional to the scale of the battle, and add to the Victorian visual effect. If it were much larger, say even 12 or 14 inches long, it would require nearly a quarter of the table for water, severely lack maneuverability, and visually dwarf the land action (which is, after all, the main subject of the game).

Moral: be ruthless with your ship sizes. The ironclad is 9", the dhows are a bit large at 8+", the gunboat is 7.5" and the launches are 6." We know a steam launch is not 2/3 the size of an ironclad, but we live with the discrepancy in order to get a reasonable number of figures in the launch, and also keep the ironclad playable.

A ship or gunboat can provide artillery support for the troops on land. Usually a gunboat is played as a one-gun battery, though it may also have riflemen and perhaps a gatling-style machine gun. The ironclad can be played as having one or two naval guns which have no range limits--they can shoot to any point on the table that is not blocked by scenery, all shots computed as if at close range. The ironclad also has a Nordenfeldt gun (similar to a Gatling) to discourage boarders and sweep the shoreline. It is a good idea to give the ship another job also, so that the captain must choose when to abandon his artillery role. For instance, we have had several games in which the army evacuates civilians from an overwhelming native assault (the natives have no fixed number of figures; they just keep recycling the dead into new units) and the ship covers the retreat, but must at some point steam to the pier to take the refugees on board, at which time the town buildings block the ship's guns and the soldiers are on their own.

The ship can have a number of marines, which it can land at some point during the game, perhaps behind enemy lines, to help the soldiers on shore. The marines will have to spend a turn in landing boats and be subject to fire from shore. The captain may have to roll in secret to see how many marines he has on board (two units, one unit, a half-unit, none). The native commander must then gamble on how many men to detach from the battle to the shore in order to guard against a landing.

Reinforcements can arrive from upriver or offshore on boats after a particular turn, with a particular die-roll. Or the entire force of one side may be delivered by boat in an amphibious landing. If the landings are opposed by enemy vessels, ship-to-ship actions are possible. For one such scenario, see the attack on Kaiserinsport.

Because of problems of scale, the ship is an underscale, but still fairly large, model located a few inches offshore, but representing a larger vessel farther out. Generally, line of sight is measured from the center of the stack for all guns on a ship and all shots against the ship. In certain scenarios, you may add 6" to the ranges of all shots from or against the ship, to represent the increased distance, or to keep the ship from controlling too much of the table.

A game may call for more figures to be onboard a ship than can physically fit on the model. You can alleviate the situation by allowing figures' bases to overlap when in tight situations like ships or buildings. Or you can just put as many of the ship's figures on deck as look good, and reserve an area for the rest somewhere to the side or off the table.

For basic instructions on building model ships and boats for gaming

RETURN to the Major General's Page
Copyright©1998 David Helber. No commercial distribution of images or text from any page on this site without written permission.