Came second in two games of POE tonight.
The victory points are giving decisive victory outcomes.
WARNING The following is just opinion. Others will chip in i am sure.
Sailing is working fine. Gunnery is working fine. Boarding is working fine.
Needs some work on making boarding markers and phasing the action into the turn sequence.
Visually good.
Scenery not tried yet.
Paper order seems to be a good idea.
Moving the weather vane hex next to the moving ship reminds players which hex that ship started in.
Stewart is considering holed sabots for each ship. That would need about 9 per pair of players.
Tonights 3 games. 2 defender wins. 1 attacker win. Maybe the terms should be hunters/rovers/bangers and merchants/escapees/prey?
Thanks Martin - it's good to see this kind of feedback on others' games and further thoughts from the designer. 2 queries on your commentary, please:
a) what are "paper orders"?
b) what's a "banger" in this context?
Good questions!
The "bangers" is reference to the US term which means low level criminals. They usually get shot, arrested etc..... just like pirates.
The paper order is something we are trying out. You will see it when i get the rules out t al this weekend. ie Each ship has a piece of paper/sabot with it's markers on it. These will be laid out in a row left to right. this will be the order for using the ships for every turn in the game. If that order causes problems, then that simulates the problem of co-ordinating sailing ships on the sea.
I took some pictures too, which i will post up.
Yes it did cause us a problem tonight, we had a warship lined up to rake an opponent but had to wait for a friendly ship further to the right on the paper Santos to get out of the way. However it was deemed that as the waiting ship should be auctioned first as its Cabot was to the left then it was just too bad and it had lost the opportunity to shoot its broadside that go.
So the Friday night saw two games for me and Michael against Martin and one with Rob as well. We played a Royal Navy squadron against Martin's renegade trying to smuggle goods through to whoever, obviously some nefarious enemy of the crown.
So in the first game Michael and I were defenders and we managed to get all three of our merchants out very quickly. There was one attempt at boarding my large merchant 'Prithin' but we had the trick no 2 if memory serves so once grappling had taken place the enemy was surprised to find the large merchant man transporting a detachment of fully armed Marines to the colonies.The 'Prithins' crew and the Marines soon saw off the boarding attempt and she made her escape. The two small warships in the squadron the Melony and Charlotte were able to tie up the remaining renegades so that the Jessica and Lady Alil were also able to make good theiŕ escape.
I have to say that in both games the wind did favour Michael and Myself.
The second game we were the attacker. It was my aim to try and use a large warship as I have made a couple but have not the opportunity to use the yet. Once again it did not happen. We got to upgrade one small warship to a medium, but then our opponents downgraded it again to small. I have not yet even been able to use one of my several medium warships either. I tried to roll to upgrade it again having won one of the other pregame selections but it did not happen. What was worse was my attèmpt to upgrade a small able warship to a small battle hardened ship went totally wrong and it ended up dropping down to a small scurvy, dreadful!!
Actually the second game though went really well for us as attackers despite our failure to upgrade any ships. Our squadron of four ships spilt into two groups, the yellow two the Melony and Charlotte to the rear and the blue pair the Lavender and Sophie (Poor Sophie being scurvy.) which was a good turn of fortune as the two blue ships sailing ahead of the renegades were able to swing round with the wind behind and on the second turn both the Lavender and Sophie swooped in and came alongside two enemy merchantmen grappling and boarding them. The Melony and Charlotte despite a harder fight did well taking the other. It was more of a struggle though at one point the vessel had two British ships trying to board one on each side, both failed to grapple and board one of them taking heavy damage as the merchant man escaped. Still it was caught again in the next turn and this time it was not so lucky! To finish up the turn we even managed to take out a warship leaving the remaining enemies of the crown fleeing in terror and no doubt promotions in-store for all of the squadrons captains. Maybe next time they will get a medium or large warship to command?
Both games very good and much fun I think had by all?
A very detailed and accurate summary of the games played last night on Martin's table. POE is a cracking game and Martin has generated a first class rule basis for the game, so give it a go if you haven't already.
Excellent write up Duncan. Thanks for doing that.