Quietly working behind the scenes................

         It seems that I have gotten caught up in a couple of projects that have absorbed my time and energies and detracted from my attention to the blog. Despite the outward appearance of abandonment things are still humming along nicely here at the workshop. I will provide a sneak-peek at something that I have been plugging away at for some time; making the Age of Sail rules more specifically adapted to the era around 1600AD rather than 1775-1815AD. This has caused to spend a fair amount of time reading (and at my age that also means a fair amount of time napping with a book over my face) and a bunch of energy testing various ideas and assembling graphics. I believe that I have managed to achieve something worthwhile in the graphics area and I am close in the rules-writing section as well. But the graphics have turned out he best so far so that is what you get to see;

 

this is what a Ship's Data Card used to look like,

 crude, utilitarian and rather less than intuitive in use

looking a great deal like a crossword puzzle on a bad LSD trip

       One of the greatest challenges in naval gaming is that ships just don't "get sick and die" very specific things happen. Masts fall, rudders are shot away, captains get shot (here's looking at you Nelson) and magazines blow up. To reflect this there are a lot of complex things going on in the game to provide that level of granularity. This data needs to be recorded in a handy, easy to understand way. As I do a lot of demo games at conventions I have found that very often the data displays for games that are perfectly adequate for a group of experienced gamers familiar with the rules tend to fail rather badly when presented to players new to the rules system. So I re-drew them.

 

the graphics are easily understood by landlubbers and new players alike,

I intend to make graphics for the crew so that instead of just ticking off boxes 

you are crossing off crew figures, the orders section may very well end up on the back

       I think that I have made things significantly easier to figure out. The blue squares represent how much water you can take on before sinking. The guns are, well, guns. The white boxes on the masts are the sheets and the brown ones are the masts. For us landsmen the "pointy end" is clearly the bows and the "big squarish bit in the back" is the stern. There is still a bit of tweaking before I will be fully happy with this effort. 

       Below you can find several more templates for ships in my navies as well as a sheet of "odd bits" which you can use by cutting and pasting them onto a hull plan to make your own ships. These were all built using MS Paint but they are all PNG files and should open in any decent graphics program