SoG at Cold Wars, Lancaster PA

[mdesensi]

Hello all,
just a reminder,
if anyone is attending Cold Wars in Lancaster, PA this weekend I will be running Sails of Glory on Friday & Saturday night at 6pm.
I'm not sure how many pre-reg slots per game are remaining but I had originally planned for 8 players per game. Stop by if interested.

Thanks!

Mike DeSensi
Pittsburgh, PA

[Nightmoss]

Good luck with the event, Mike. Be sure to have someone taking photos! Written AAR's are also appreciated. :happy:

[DeRuyter]

Mike:

I'll see you there. I'll try and stop by Saturday night. If you are around on Thursday night I am running the "Battle of Grand Port" at 7 pm. The game was full before I pre-registered myself! This is encouraging for SoG!

Eric

[mdesensi]

Ahoy!

I’d like to share some photos of the three games of SoG that I ran at Cold Wars, Lancaster, PA this past weekend. I don’t really have an after action report, per se, mostly since it was intended more as a demo.

On Friday, I had a full table of 8 players. There were so many people who came up and asked if there were any no-shows that I ended up running a second game immediately after. I had 8 players again!

On Saturday, the event was supposedly filled, but Saturday nights are notorious for lots of no-shows. And this was no exception. We played with 5 players, but had a full table of on-lookers who didn’t want to play an entire game but were interested enough to sit and learn the rules.

Setup:
Each player controlled a frigate and a ship-of-the-line. They started on opposite sides of the game board (4ft x 6ft), while this is not the way an engagement would occur, it was an easy way for the players to square off and learn about the movement deck while closing on the enemy. Funny side-note about the movement deck: on Saturday night there was a player who was maneuvering rather haphazardly; when questioned about it he stated that that was the card on the top of the deck. He didn’t realize that you were supposed to look at the cards and plan your moves; he just shuffled the deck and took the top card!! I may use this idea at a convention!! Evil grin!

The Rules:
I started with the Basic Rules, one card at a time. The plan was to eventually move into the Standard 2-card planning after people became familiar with the deck. When put to a vote, 6 voted to continue with a single card. Hooray for democracy! On Saturday, I didn’t even bother to ask. Boo for fascism!

I eventually added the wind direction rule, as the wind was putting some ships into a bind with little room to maneuver. I hadn’t thought of that, mostly because I hadn’t thought the game would go on for the full 4 hours. Even with the wind change rules, the wind changed direction only once in two of the three games.

Some other changes I made: (I want to declare that this was just for a convention/demo game, not the way I play). For friendly collisions, I ignored the damage but they became entangled for 1 complete turn. I also had them do nothing for 1 turn when entangled. On the turn after, everyone got untangled as if they had pulled the correct chit from the cup. Again, since this was a convention game, I don’t like to have players just sit there and do nothing because they can’t pull the correct chit.

Some concepts that people really didn’t seem to grasp right away: the damage boxes on the ship log. There was a player trying to ‘make change’ because he was trying to carry over extra damage. Another was the crew damage tokens. In most cases, if for example the chit was 2 + crew damage, they thought it meant two crew damage markers, not 2 hull damage plus crew damage.

All in all, I think the games went very well. Everyone had a great time (the whole point), and everyone seemed to walk away with a good idea of how the game works. There was lots of interest in Sails of Glory over the weekend and a number of people told me they bought the game because of my demo or had attended because they already own it but haven’t learned the rules yet. After the games, I did go over some of the Standard and Advanced rules with those showing interest and everyone seemed pleased that the complexity of the game is variable to suit the individual’s desire.

Lessons learned: The basic rules are the way to go, without a doubt. As stated above, I thought about transitioning to the 2 card Standard rules (and even before the con, was considering starting there in the first place) but the single card was the way to go.
Another lesson would be to add the basic boarding rules. In every case where the ships became entangled someone asked “Can I board him?”

Next time, I’ll do a beginner’s game where I’ll teach the rules and another where rules knowledge will be required so that a more challenging game experience can be had.

Thanks for reading!! I’m going to get some sleep. I need a weekend to recover from my weekend!!

Mike DeSensi
Pittsburgh, PA

[Coog]

Great photos and observations. Thanks for posting.

[Nightmoss]

Thanks Mike. Great photos and convention report. Lots of fun for everyone from your description! :thumbsup: