Andrew and Rebecca Hall wrote in message <3AFF5FDB.A2FF024C@wtez.net>... Andreas Gustafsson wrote: >Are there anyone out there who can tell me >something about it? Is it fun, balanced, >fast playing? It's a very good treatment of the subject, and most games that have appeared since on that topic (both board and computer games, all the way up through Age of Sail II) have borrowed a fair amount from its organization and mechanics. Many (most?) of the scenarios are not espescially well balanced, but they are based on historical actions that weren't balanced, either, and it's a very simple matter to set up and play a head-to-head game with identical forces. It does not play fast, especially if you have more than two or three ships to a side, because all movement (and many other functions) are all pre-plotted in advance. The record-keeping involved is the biggest drawback of the game. The real fun (as well as historical flavor) only comes in when you start using the optional and advanced rules. These are, for the most part, quite well written, but they will seem rather quirky and arbitrary if you're not familiar with the minutiae of naval combat in that period. If you know the reasons underlying them, they're not difficult; if you're new to the subject, they will appear overly complex. Seems to me like you have a great opportunity to adapt WS&IM to a vigorous naval conflict that's not well known here in the States, the Russo-Swedish War of 1808-09. Are there any oddities we should know about or extra enjoyable experiences you want to share? One very bizarre occurrence, and one that is not at all typical of the game: I have almost always played solitaire, and WS&IM was the first game I played against a friend. He was (is) a very experienced gamer, and I think he thought he'd go easy on me my first time out. But although he was an experienced gamer, I think I probably still had as much or more expereince with WS&IM as he had. For sure, I'd read Hornblower and he hadn't. We set up identical frigates, on opposite tacks and level with each other (i.e., neither ship to windward of the other), and started plotting our movements. On the second or third turn, we were about to cross on opposite tacks, starboard broadside to starboard broadside, at point-blank range. Timing my moment carefully, I swung up into the wind, putting my entire broadside directly across his bow -- a raking broadside, at a range of one, with an added bonus in that it would be my first shot fired. (At the time I thought it was a neat trick, but in retrospect I'm surprise he didn't try something similar. The maneuver says less about my skill than it does about his inattention.) Anyway, we rolled the dice and I got a critical hit to his magazine. We rolled again -- with the relevant die modifications it turned out to be an even 50-50 chance that his magazine would go up -- and he survived, with heavy damage and casualties from the raking broadside. He was politely confident going into the game, not taking me too seriously as an opponent, then pow! -- in the space of a single turn, he's rolling even money whether on not he survives. That rattled him pretty well, and he remained overly cautious for the rest of the game. For the rest of the game we traded broadsides fairly evenly, but starting out with that initial damage he couldn't catch up. I won, but not by too much. As I said, this example is not typical of the results in WS&IM generally, but is a rather bizarre coincidence. It's a great memory for me, though. -------------AH