"Captaincy - anyone tried these rules?" Topic

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According to Boardgamegeek, "Each player controls 1-3 ships. Ships alternate rolling dice to move; big numbers increase speed, but trigger undesirable effects like heeling and drifting. There are no written orders."

They sound as if they have some interesting mechanics, but detail on game play is lacking. Though I do worry when the free QR sheet is 8 pages long…

Just wondered if any of you have tried them.

Nick

"Each player controls 1-3 ships. Ships alternate rolling dice to move; big numbers increase speed, but trigger undesirable effects like heeling and drifting. There are no written orders."

No. That very sentence show why I never will. That doesn't accord to my understanding of how ships sail either in the Age of Sail or today. I'll stick to rules bounded in the real world.

I have to agree with 138 here. Random movement, random movement effects. No thanks. I might read them if they are free, just to see if the Geek got the description wrong, but I'm not setting my expectations high.

Never say never, mateys, that's my response as the designer of Captaincy. I have learned a lot from rules I didn't necesarily wind up playing. I have put in a lot of effort into making Captaincy a provocative and informative read for Age of Sail wargamers -- of course, I also think it's a fine game on the table.

Why is there a random element in sailing? Randomization tells players that some aspect of the situation is not wholly within their control. This reflects my experience of sailing -- I feel that my intentions are constantly bent or thwarted by the forces around me, more so than when I am riding in a car or a train, say. I used a dice rolling and sorting mechanic to give players this sense of coping with a semi-predictable force of nature.

The wind is not constant in rate, volume, or direction, especially not where AoS battles were usually fought, in coastal and estuarial waters. There, the forces that affect ships are further complicated by headlands, shoals, freshwater currents, thermal exchanges with the landmass, and many other factors that are hard to account for even with a computer, and that aggregate to feeling "random." The dice mechanic in Captaincy is a playable metaphor, rather than an exact model, for this massive topic. It was a hard set of rules to write, and it requires a few dense pages of explanation, to be honest with you. It's something you will want to work out on the table with dice and a ruler as your follow it. There are several pages of visual examples that help. At conventions, most players get the hang of it in two turns or so. The cannon fire rules, are by contrast, more simple and deterministic than in many games.

This design goal was also guided by the historical record. Many AoS ships that might be rated as fast or sturdy or well-armed and therefore attractive in a game, were decried by sailors of the period for being "tender" or "crank" or "leewardly," that is, too responsive to the wind, or responsive in ways that were dangerous in combat. I wanted to write a game that demonstrated these important distinctions in sailing performance.

To Bozkashi Jones: The game is run off two pages of handouts, plus a sequence of play, and a data card for your ship. A table on the handout shows a range of sailing performance for three rigging types: square, fore-aft, and ketch. This table is kind of crowded for new players, so I made alternative versions that only show information for one kind of ship -- the kind the newcomer is playing. That's why there are 8 pages of handouts on BGG. Thanks for your interest!

cheers,
John

Cheers John – thanks for taking the time to respond.

I agree on the unpredictability of the wind, being a sailor myself, especially when close to shore and subject to environmental conditions.

Exactly how randomized are these random speed differentials?

B

Ahoy Blutarski,

Movement is in units keyed to the scale of the models, so let's say inches.

You will usually roll 4 to 6 d6, depending on how much canvas you carry. Each die's score produces some headway -- movement to bow -- at the following rate: 1 = 0", 2-3 = 1", 4 or more = 2". At 4d6, thus, you will usually move about 6" headway & no more than 8". There is a slim chance of little or no movement, but sailing can be stop and go, in real life.

A high die score can trigger leeway (1" to lee and/or a heeled over penalty in combat) or sternway (1" backward movement, instead of headway, plus you halt after two sternway dice in a row). Whether these forces come up depends, again, on how much sail you raise, and on your heading to the wind. If you are broadside to the wind, with a lot of sail up, you will go fast, but you will often get 1" of leeway; maybe 2" if your ship is "leewardly."

Other points: The better your deck crew is, the more dice you can re-roll. The leeway and sternway forces are friends that can help you change course in the direction they are pushing you. Maneuvers like backing astern can be pieced together from the dice results depending on in what order you spend the dice.

There are more niceties, but that's the gist of it. It's a broad brush, "design for effect" treatment of a very complicated topic, to be sure. But it isn't "throw a die, move that many spaces," if that was the concern.

One more reason I did it: it makes a chase interesting. A combination of luck and skilled crew re-rolls might let you catch Captain Kidd. With flat rate movement there is little point in playing out a chase.

Hi CC – Based upon the above bare bones mechanics, 4D6, 5D6 and 6D6 appear to correspond to average movement distances of 5.3 units @ battle sail, 6.7 units @ easy sail and 8 units @ full sail. I assume that further modifications come into play to reflect point of sailing, weather state and sail/mast damage. It's potentially an interesting game mechanic on a fundamental basis, but it is hard to comment further based upon lack of more detailed info.

I do agree that the table-top modeling of shiphandling can be "a very complicated topic" as you say.

Kudos to you for making an effort to reflect individual ship personalities – weatherliness/leewardliness, crankness, handiness, etc.

B

Hey,

I was intrigued by this post so I took the plunge and picked up a copy. I have been reading a LOT of rule sets lately, trying to find a game to play with the 3D printed ships that I was inspired to start modelling (Shameless plug: TMP link)

big numbers increase speed, but trigger undesirable effects like heeling and drifting

wildly oversimplifies and undersells this system. I'm honestly only about half way through these rules, but it's the first time that a rule set has given me the sense of a Captain standing on the quarterdeck studying the wind and his sails and puzzling out the best course of action for the situation that he's presented with.

This is NOT like Osprey's Fighting Sail's "roll dice to get movement points" system. It seems like the dice give resources that you need to decide how to best use. The order you spend them in dramatically impacts the outcome, and it's not just a matter of optimizing the roll to get the most out of it – there are consequences for pushing hard making it a balancing act that will force you to factor the current tactical situation in to you planning in a really exciting way.

Again, I haven't even finished reading the rules, let alone playing them, but I'm excited. They are a bit on the complex side, and I'm not sure how that'll go over with my usual opponents, but I have high hopes for these rules!

Thanks for the kind words. I hope you get a chance to play. An easy jump-in would be a frigate vs frigate duel, maybe with a rock on the board for interest. That way you can tune out the succession rule and the specific scenario generator rules for the first game.

At conventions, the best teaching tool has been to follow the sequence of play handout religiously for the first few turns. Turns will often go quickly once you get the hang of them, in my experience. As in real life, coming about to a new tack is the hardest move -- you might want to practice it out of play.

I want to encourage more people to check out Captaincy -- and, ideally, to post responses here, or on boardgamegeek, or in other places -- so I've lowered the price to $10 USD PDF, $9 USD print, until May 1, 2017. (I've been waiting to do this for a couple of months while we cleared up a problem with the print production.)

Epengr, since you've written about the game, and in appreciation for the ship designs you're sharing on thingiverse*, write me as listed in the game if you want a rebate commensurate with the sale.

* I use 1/450th to 1/600th . . .do these scale up?

Cursd Captain

Hey Cursd Captain,

That's very generous, I'll be in touch. I saw it on sale yesterday and had a grr moment :). I appreciate your offer.

You can certainly scale them up, the Victory should look really good – the rest have slightly less detail once I saw how the Victory turned out at 1/1200. Printing some at 1/600 is on my to-do list, as is refining the sails for all the vessels and adding more ships, but work's been busy the last week or so. I don't know how well the existing Sail models will scale up… That may need s little work to look really good.

A bit of threadomancy, I'm afraid, but a free condensed version of these rules (called 'Enterprize') is available on Wargames Vault: link

I've downloaded them and will give them a go, but I have to say that they do look very interesting on first reading. If they play the way I think they'll play they should really simulate the skill needed for handling a ship under sail.

Interested to hear if anyone else has played these and hear you thoughts, I have them in mind for a small campaign I'm planning.

Nick

Your threadomancy brings the whole project back to an uncanny life!

Enterprize is gone for the moment, Nick, but I will be putting a new version on Wargame Vault in a few weeks as part of our relaunch. I'll post here when that happens.