First Game of 2014: Sails of Glory

 My son and I got our first game of 2014 in on Jan 1st!  We played an introductory scenario for "Sails of Glory".  Sails of Glory plays a little bit like "Wings of Glory" or even "X-Wing" in that movement is based on using cards that are revealed simultaneously.  The game does a surprisingly good job at giving the feel of maneuvering a sailing ship without a lot of complexity.  Wind attitude is handled very well as is very intuitive for experienced sailors such as my son and myself - that's a big plus!

As you can see in the picture above, each ship has a status card for tracking damage and other aspects of the ship - guns loaded or unloaded, crew status, sail settings it all works very well.

Damage is based on range and then drawing chits out of the bags - "A" for long range (the yellow part of the stick) and "B" for short range.  The "B" chits tend to produce more damage than the "A" ones.

Here's a shot of our two ships maneuvering for the first shot.  As stated above, players pick a maneuver card and then reveal them.  Place the card in front of your ship and move accordingly. While it's hard to see from the picture the ship bases are very well laid out and have marking to show the gun angles and wind attitude.  Wind attitude is color based with green representing breaching (that's the fastest), Orange (Beating or Running) or Red for taken aback (the bow is facing into the wind).

Our game featured two 74 gun ships of the line in a duel.  I commanded the HMS Defense while Sean skippered the French Ship Genereux.  Our game took about 30 minutes and went down the wire with the Defense just eeking out a victory over the Genereux!  I think I only had two damage points left!

All in all it was a very fun game and really captured the feel of a sailing encounter (in my opinion).  We're going to play again tonight and I'll report back.  One other plus is that while the scale of the pre-painted models is 1/1000, the bases can easily accommodate my 1/1200 Langtons!

I purchased my copy of Sails of Glory via Kickstarter.