Brest Breakout 1886 - Part 2

Opening Moves

The French plot has them moving out and and to the south. The Shah and the 2 gunboats are placed inshore, while the main British squadron is in patrol mode to the southwest. As soon as the French round the headland they're spotted by the British and all squadrons are Active. The Shah and gunboats will share the table with the lead French ships. We need to generate 2 things now: the Grand Tactical Map and the tabletop coastline.

Here's my first attempt at the GT map. It's way too small, because I was too lazy to go and find my pad of A3 graph paper, and tried to do it on a notebook I had handy instead. The big X on the left is the position of Spiffington's main squadron, off-table. The map is scaled at 1mm on map = 1 cm on table. Later, when I have to scroll southwards, I'm going to have to replace this map with a bigger one.

For the coastline I went for the most lazy cheap-arse option I could think of, not just because I'm a lazy cheap-arse, but also because this stuff needs to be made to order in minutes. So I just used old bits of cardboard in 30 cm sections, cut with scissors to match the terrain in each square. Amazon envelopes are ideal for this, but any old cardboard will do. It's not beautiful, but it is very functional and quick. Our focus is on the more watery aspects of the table. You could of course use felt, or if you have a box of lovely coastline terrain then just do your best to approximate the actual lay of the land.

The British scouting force spots the French emerging from Le Goulet

The coastal forces move ahead to screen Admiral Désespéré's squadron. Note only the first two ships of the main squadron are on the table. The rest of his squadron are off table on the GT map:

As the French move forward, the British scouting force turns to the west to fall back on the main force...

 ... and as they reach the western edge of the table it's time for a scroll.

To do this, all the ships and terrain move 30cm east. Any terrain pieces that fall off the eastern end are put to one side, and new pieces are cut and placed on the western edge. Any ships that fall off the eastern edge have their positions marked on the GT map. This should always be done before movement, so that any inaccuracies become fairly irrelevant after the movement phase. Here's the position after the scroll and before movement:

Here's the updated GT map:

And this shows the area that the table is now covering on the Op Map:

Spiffington's main force starts to arrive from the west and the French torpedo boats begin a desperate attempt to disrupt them and buy time for Désespéré's force to slip by:

At this point I had to break the game down because I needed the space for something else. I didn't feel like I was anywhere near done with it, in fact it felt like things were just starting to develop, so I decided to try and record the game state and reinstate it a later date. I'll describe how I did that in Part 3.