Based on the TFL "What a Tanker' armour rules, WillB and I had a go at my "Beast vs. Shingle" game of the Merrimac verses the Monitor naval battle of 1862.
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| The Merrimac (yes, not the bloody CSS Virginia thank you!) |
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| The pencil drawn rivets shown to good effect. The turret is a wooden liquor bottle stopper - to scale (~ 1:200 ) |
Designed to 'feel' like the historical battle i.e. lots of shots, not so much effect and with only a few 'critical' occurrences, the game certainly fills the bill, and can be a bit frustrating (no doubt also to the naval gunners of the battle) how our carefully aimed shot can bounce off the armour of your opponent with the frequency which is hair-pulling. Fun stuff. At one point Will rolled his defence dice and declared "Don't bother rolling, you can't hurt me..." Yeah, fun stuff. It takes patience and a slow whittling away at the enemy's strength. The real battle lasted over four hours.
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| WillB adjusting the turret of the Monitor. My rather crude and very un-mathematical template is beneath. |
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| The two ships make another pass at each other. The ships tend to do large lazy loops around each other --as did the original combatants. |
But in all fairness, karma did go both ways and the all-important 'critical hit' had his pilot house out of action and thus the Monitor was out of control for a period of time. Now of course it was moving slowly (and slowing each turn) but, by luck, drifted just out of line with all my guns (the Merrimac did/does have several blind spots) and I could do little as I was already dead in the water! His turret still could turn and with a final, point blank shot did enough damage to have my worn out crew surrender their ship (no more command dice).
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| Ramming at a snails pace does little effect and the two ships merely rubbed against each other at one point during the game |
The making of the ships is described here:
my previous post
