Black Seas First Game

Black Seas - The Age Of Sail era, fleet ship-of-the-line, combat game set between 1770 and 1830.

Black Seas is Warlord Games new Historical game. It has been out about a month or so now, and has received very good reviews. Warlord Games has chosen 1/700 for their scale and this gives a good balance between allowing a good number of ships on the table, and also maintaining highly detailed models.

I had resisted this at first as I was not going to take on another new game that was not going to get much game play, as most of my gaming group are either roleplaying or playing board games at the current time. However Chris at work and sometimes contributor on the blog picked up a set of the core game Master and Commander and the British and French Fleet boxes. Seeing him put together his ships and seeing the high quality of the miniatures my hidden love of naval wargaming came to surface. 

My previous experience with Naval Wargaming has come from a very young age at school where I played Harpoon, and Age of Sail at the wargaming club. I still have a very large collection of Modern Naval ships for Harpoon and all the rules and at some point I will dust it off and get Chris to have a couple of games with me.

But back to Black Sails. Set in the period from 1770 to 1830 this allows players to play in a range of conflicts from War of Indepence, pirate engagements to Cadiz the Battle of the Nile and of course The Battle of Trafalgar. 

I will review the ships in more detail in a future post. 

But today we had our first run through of the rules. The basic rules are very easy to pick up and learn, however the devil is in the detail of learning how to use the Wind Gauge and correctly setting your sails so that you can bring your broadside to bear.

Below are a couple of action shots from todays run through.

As you can see Black Seas uses a similar wake markers to show your setting of the sails as Cruel Seas uses to show speed of the MtBs. Ships are activated using the Wind Gauge, you note the direction of the wind and move an imaginary line across the table and as the line hits the ships the take action in the order that the Wind Gauge hits the ships. The ranges of the guns are good and use a base number of 5 or less to hit with modifiers for how fast you and the target ship are sailing, with 1s being a critical hit. Damage to ships is slow and accumilating, but I think this is due to us only having 2 ships and probably spending more time playing with the movement and positioning of the ships, rather than putting out raking broadsides. 

So far I am really enjoying the game and it is certainly one that I see me and Chris getting a lot of games in. As you can see from the pictures I have been playing around with GWs contrast paints to get a nice quick and easy paint job done on the ships. But more on this to follow.

I am going to write up some more detailed reviews and thoughts on this game with the more we play.

Has anyone else picked up the game or thinking of playing it?