"War of 1812 Sea Eagles Rules" Topic

Thoroughbred Miniatures has released "Sea Eagles" a set of rules for small ship actions in the War of 1812. Formerly known as "Prevailing Winds", Sea Eagles is an updated and modified set to make the system work smoother. Now gamers can combine sea and land actions together for scenarios for raids, cutting out actions or just ships banging away. Thoroughbred provides ship kits for ships from 1 gun schooners to 20 sloops. Including Xebecs, Fellucas, and Polacres for those who want to try Barbary coast actions. Crews, guns and kits may be customized to your desires.

Prevailing winds looked to be quite good.

Interested to see how they've changed from the original set.

Sounds promising…

Looks like I'll be spending some time and money with Toby at Fall In! Of course, that was already in the plan!

Changes include, single movement step, instead of the two leg system. Different turn and speed bonuses for square rigged, fore and aft rigged and lateen rigged ships. Critical hits now do critical damage, no more "no effects". Land combat is now done with the cards just like a ship and the two can interact. Had a gunboat get to close to shore and almost get decrewed by a militia land unit. The new ship data cards contain much more information tailored to the ship and the rules. The total number of player cards are reduced so as not having a stack of playsheets in front of each player. Much remains from Prevailing Winds, but the flow and game system works much better.

Do the Sea Eagles rules work with other scales? Would it be fairly simple for a player to adjust them to a new scale, or are there too many aspects based on the given scale for that to work?

Never tried it. The ranges and movement as is would most likely be long for 1/1200 scale. You could try cutting the gunnery ranges in half and reduce movement to 1 Inch per knot. Good question. If you do try it let me know how it worked out. Just remember these are designed for small ship actions, not sure how the HMS Victory would do. Need a whole bag of 20 sided die.

I agree with Randy – dread100 – who was very instrumental in the rewrite and new release of these rules,,,,plus he has run and played in more games using Sea Eagles than anyone else. I believe going up one scale size to 20mm or down one to 10mm will work OK as written. But you will most likely have to jockey distances and other measurements if you go beyond those scales. The game mechanics and play sequence is very doable with varied scales.
Toby Barrett

Thanks Toby, but please tell me if I've got the math right here…

Sea Eagles is at 15mm scale, which (according to the TMP scale reference page) is 1mm in minature = 107 mm in reality.

The ships I play with are 1:1000 scale. Meaning 1mm in miniature = 1 meter or 1,000 real mm.

So, to make Sea Eagles work with my minis, it seems like I'd have to divide everything by 9.36 (ranges, movement, etc.) to get it to work in 1:1000 scale.

Is that correct? Sounds too awkward to be feasible. I'd be willing to try it, but the only way to know is to buy the rules sight unseen and gamble on it. There's no preview or summary or anything on the website to let a prospective customer evaluate what these rules are about, why they're better, what makes them special, what they're best suited for, etc. So I'll be continuing to hold off until I can learn more.

You are probably pretty close with that scale or even 1/1200 scale to divide by 10 for all the ranges and movement. Again these are for small ships and gunboats, ships of the line or large frigates would really tax the system. Most ships can move at a speed of around 10 knots which in the 15mm range is 20 inches. For the smaller scale, 2 inches would be about right, but slower speeds would be really short. However a flock of one, two or even three gun gunboats on a 5 X 9 table banging away at each other, is a hoot. Trying to see if the carronades can get into range before the longer guns nit pick them to death.

I just bought them. They look promising, but are of course incomplete. Apparently you have to buy the ships to get the information on how many crew, hit boxes, etc. I have ships I made myself, and the rules give no information that I have found on how to set up a ship yourself. It is obvious that masts, rigging, hull etc take multiple hits, but if you are given no information on how to determine the number of hits those things take, the $32 USD I spent on the rules is of little to no use.

Update. When I emailed them and asked, they were happy to send me some of the filled out ship data charts to give an idea for how to fill them out for myself.

Bill,

If you search Prevailing Winds on the Age of Sail message board you should find a post from someone who has a formula for working out the stats of ships not listed in the rules.

'Prevailing Winds' is an earlier iteration of 'Sea Eagles'; it has stats for ships involved in the 1812 war.