"It is Warm Work" Age of Sail Rules

As I mentioned previously, I recently had a little tryout of "It is Warm Work", a fast play set of rules intended for the 18th Century, as part of a project to write or adapt a set of fleet-level rules for the Dutch Wars. I thought I'd share some rambling thoughts.

The Good Stuff

These are an incredibly simple and enjoyable set of rules. It's a simple initiative-based IGoUGo format with a bucket-of-dice mechanism for gunnery.

Damage is marked by a single damage track for each ship which are recorded on ship rosters, though I chose to print the ship stats onto a label attached to the ship and use markers to count damage steps. There are also critical hit states for which markers are provided.

1st - 5th rates, with damage tracks printed onto labels.

Chart lookups are pretty rare and I found myself constantly surprised at how quick and painless it was to get through a gunnery phase.

The rulebook is clear and concise - only 6 pages of main rules (including some example illustrations) and a further 5 pages of additional/optional rules. The learning curve is very gentle. I was able to play a game solo with 20 ships a side in about 4 hours, having never played the game before.

The Not So Good

I have a couple of minor beefs.

Sailing too close to the wind

Firstly, the game allows ships to be close hauled at 45º off the wind. As I understand it - and I freely admit I'm just a landlubberly armchair admiral so I could be wrong - square riggers should be able to do at best about 6 points off the wind (67.5º). In fact in the period I'm interested in - the 17th Century - it's probably closer to about 7 points (78.75º) for many ships. To be fair, the majority of Age of Sail rules I've come across get this wrong, and it seems to be a source of confusion for some naval historians too. The reason for the confusion is covered in this article by Sam Willis.

It's an easy fix of course, I just used a template from another ruleset I've been working on (for the 16th Century) with a 75º angle. It's incredibly hard to measure this right in the heat of the action, and that's probably another reason why the 45º thing is so common. 45º is just much easier for players to visualise and measure, but for me I think it underplays the importance of the weather gage and makes you wonder why anyone would ever be scared of a lee shore!

Too Bloody

 

Again it's a bit unfair to single out these rules for this, since it's pretty much the norm for 'fast play' rules, but the game is just way too bloody for my taste. I understand the reason for it, players want to roll dice and make stuff happen - no one wants to blast away endlessly with little effect - and it's nice to be able to get a decisive result in a reasonable time frame. But I had ships get hammered at long range before they'd even had a chance to get properly engaged, and it just felt a bit much.

At the same time it could be said that the bucket-of-dice system is not bloody enough at times, and perhaps my real problem is that I have a love/hate relationship with BoD mechanics. The way it works is: you roll a number of dice equal to your current gunnery factor (on the ship's damage track), and you need 6s at long range and 5s and 6s at short range. The other player then rolls to save, needing 6s. This means it's entirely possible for a fresh 1st rate to score no hits at short range.

As a fix, I'm going to try something like increasing the saving rolls from 6 to 5+, and perhaps to 4+ at long range.

Conclusion

Don't let my grumpy, beard-stroking misgivings put you off. These are are a great set of rules for a quick and easy game for 6 or more ships a side, and are easily tweakable if you feel so inclined. For six bucks it's a no brainer.