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I'm wondering if there is any naval wargames or ship battles or something like that?

There are literally hundreds, and I'm sure we can recommend some for a particular period or scale (lots of ships with minimal detail, or a few ships with detailed batteries and damage) if you wanted.

I don't have any suggestions offhand because I haven't played any in about 15 years.

I'm tempted to get something to recreate the Greek Vs Persian naval battles of the 2nd Persian invasion (what 300: Rise of An Empire is based on, but I've forgotten the actual name).

Herzlos has the right of it. We're going to need at least a time period, genre, and a scale (do you want to control a single ship or a fleet) before anyone can help you.

That would be Salamis, where 370 Greek Coalition ships engaged 1200 Imperial Persian ships in the largest naval battle of classical antiquity.

There are naval wargames for every period from the classical age to interstellar warfare. (Played in 2D it usually works very like WW2 naval.)

For Salamis, the Rod Langton set is available for free download...
http://www.rodlangton.com/ancient/ancframe.htm

He does the models in metal.

There is an old board game called "Ram Speed" for which you can get the rules from Boardgamegeek.
http://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/2914/ram-speed-rules-pdf

If you want to recreate Salamis in its entirety, some kind of streamlined rules would be a good idea. You really don't want to have to move several hundred ships one at a time.

Dreadfleet lol.

Space battle games are essentially naval games of a sort
given the limited nature of portraying 3d battle on a 2d plane.

 Col. Tartleton wrote:
That would be Salamis, where 370 Greek Coalition ships engaged 1200 Imperial Persian ships in the largest naval battle of classical antiquity.

That's the one

If you like steampunk, try Dystopian wars - quite a fun little game, I have a few friends who play. It's basically an alternate past game, and has a pretty cool Victorian Era style to it, and the starter sets are pretty cheap.

http://www.spartangames.co.uk/products/dystopian-world/dystopian-wars

There's a new one that's making the rounds at the FLGS called "Sails of Glory," if I remember correctly. It's set in the 16th and 17th century, I believe.

 Maddermax wrote:
If you like steampunk, try Dystopian wars - quite a fun little game, I have a few friends who play. It's basically an alternate past game, and has a pretty cool Victorian Era style to it, and the starter sets are pretty cheap.

http://www.spartangames.co.uk/products/dystopian-world/dystopian-wars

I really like Dystopian Wars, the models are excellent quality and the aesthetic is something I greatly enjoy.

I've heard mixed opinions on the rules, but I also know the second edition of the rulebook is coming this summer.

If you are looking for complex historical games (WWI - WWII), Naval Thunder and Seekrieg are a couple of solid choices. That later of which even has their old 4th edition rules available for free download.

Yeah, there are a lot of Naval games out there. I have not found one I really like myself. I played the Axis & Allies War at Sea game for awhile, but the rules are pretty simple. The models of WWII ships are great however.

I would always be open to hearing about any good WWII naval games.

Thanks,
Duncan

Pirates of the Spanish Main was always cheap and fun. We used the ships for 7th Sea RPing too

 Maddermax wrote:
If you like steampunk, try Dystopian wars - quite a fun little game, I have a few friends who play. It's basically an alternate past game, and has a pretty cool Victorian Era style to it, and the starter sets are pretty cheap.

http://www.spartangames.co.uk/products/dystopian-world/dystopian-wars

I third this. Models are pretty nice, and the 2.0 version of the rules is due out in the next couple of weeks which should speed up gameplay - the rules for aircraft in particular are a bit fiddly.

Each faction has a quite distinctive play-style, and overall it's balanced pretty well with a few exceptions (Covenant of Antarctica and Ottoman Empire, I'm looking at you!)

Wopps, I removed my Aquanautica Imperialis from my Sig.

Go here: http://www.freewargamesrules.co.uk/sci-fi.html

in the Sci-Fi section you can find Aquanautica Imperialis for Naval 40K action.

Plus, there are a lot of other great historical Naval rulesets too.

 Accolade wrote:

 Maddermax wrote:
If you like steampunk, try Dystopian wars - quite a fun little game, I have a few friends who play. It's basically an alternate past game, and has a pretty cool Victorian Era style to it, and the starter sets are pretty cheap.

http://www.spartangames.co.uk/products/dystopian-world/dystopian-wars

I really like Dystopian Wars, the models are excellent quality and the aesthetic is something I greatly enjoy.

I've heard mixed opinions on the rules, but I also know the second edition of the rulebook is coming this summer.

I hadn't heard about the second edition- hot on the heels of the same for Firestorm Armada! Spartan Games certainly casts a wide net... but other than some rules issues, I've seen the local folks who play it generally enjoying this game.

Yes, there are some very good naval games out there.

GHQ makes some teeny tiny ships for age of sail games specifically Trafalgar.

Sails of Glory, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, Sailpower all share some similar mechanics as well as being different scales.

I would recommend Sailpower, I know the guy that wrote it and 15mm is a lot of fun.

Sails of Glory is probably easier to get a hold of than anything else right now.

Wooden Ships & Iron Men is classic, but can be a bit crunchy.

If you are more interested in modern Navies then you might try to locate a copy of Harpoon! It uses a lot of combined arms in its play style, subs, surface craft, airplanes.

 Farseer Faenyin wrote:
Pirates of the Spanish Main was always cheap and fun. We used the ships for 7th Sea RPing too

+1 to Pirates of the Spanish Main. Noble Knight games still has some of their stuff for sale, I believe.

For lovers of complexity or simply crazy gamers with lots of time I'd recomend Supermarina or Rising Sun from Clash of Arms... to think I had to buy a protactor to fire torpedoes :O

M.

 vadersson wrote:
Yeah, there are a lot of Naval games out there. I have not found one I really like myself. I played the Axis & Allies War at Sea game for awhile, but the rules are pretty simple. The models of WWII ships are great however.

I would always be open to hearing about any good WWII naval games.

Thanks,
Duncan

General Quarters III covers WW2 and WW1.

http://www.odgw.com/products/generalquarters3/gq3.html

The first edition rules are slightly simpler and still available from Navwar in London.
http://www.navwar.co.uk/nav/default.asp?MMID=103

The first edition WW1 rules (confusingly called General Quarters 2) appear to be out of print -- you might find them second hand.

As for models, Navwar do 1/3000 ships, GHQ do 1/2400 scale, various Japanese companies do 1/700 scale plastic kits -- mostly for Pacific War subjects. The Axis & Allies War At Sea includes pre-painted ship models, and Mongoose's new naval game has ship models in 1/1800 scale.

Needless to say, the Mongoose and Axis & Allies ships are the most expensive.

To give you an idea of model size, a 1/3000 scale battleship is about two inches long, and its main guns would have a range of 20 to 30 feet on the tabletop in true scale. For obvious reasons most games compress the linear scale quite a lot. (I have for fun played out larger battles on the floor in a hired community hall.)

If you want to play on a tabletop, the larger models are best used in fairly small numbers, otherwise the amount of "ship" starts to look silly compared to the range of the weapons.

There are model planes available in 1/700 and 1/600 scale. Most people use these with the 1/3000 or 1/2400 scale ships because otherwise the planes would be too small to see.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I will just mention that you can of course play any rules with any scale models by making an appropriate adjustment to the weapon ranges, so do not feel you have to use Mongoose models with the Mongoose rules.

Thank Kilkrazy! Go you have any more detail on GQ3? I was able to find reviews and articles on Mongoose's VaS, but nothing on GQ3. I am curious what it is like.

Thanks,
Duncan

There was also an Axis and Allies Naval game for WW2 that was enjoyable if a little over simplified.

For fun stuff with sea monsters and a fantasy setting there's....

Wiz Kidz, Pirates game.
Basically a ccg with small boats that pop out from plastic credit cards and slot together.
I'd never heard of it until some landed on my lap but it looked pretty basic so I flogged them on ebay.
They went cheap.

Spartan Games, Unchartered Seas.

Also, no one has mentioned GWs, Man O War.
Prices vary dramatically on ebay but with a bit of work you should be able to get a decent fleet or two for cheap.

Starfleet Battles

aka

Spreadsheets, The Game

 Zygrot24 wrote:
Starfleet Battles

aka

Spreadsheets, The Game

I hear this a lot about SFB, never really understood the comment, used to play it a fair bit over lunch at college, four or five way games with three or four ships each taking about an hour or so. The only spreadsheet like bit was the energy allocation, but mostly that didn't take all that long (ships typically having similar plots within your fleet if you picked them right), damage allocation could take a while but we did it with one bod rolling dice and calling the results, the other marking damage and counting. One guy controlling the movement chart, bit of paper as a rule you could make notes on and it played pretty fast.

As long as no one tried to defend a starbase with mines, or took a Kzinti CVA group, such people want shooting.

Like any other game you just needed to learn it, found you very seldom needed the rulebooks, which was good as I could seldom carry it all at once, photocopied the ships down to A5 and the two basic boxes held the ships, counters, maps, dice and that was about it, reasonably portable.

Bit of a sharp learning curve though, and a rulebook only a lawyer could love, but by gork I wish GW would learn from how its written.

Federation and Empire is different though, four hours just to set it up...


Navy games, Mongoose do a nice WW2 one called Victory at Sea, just use the models from someone else as the mongoose range is pants. The game does need the Order of Battle expansion to make sense though (otherwise you get destroyers that can never be hit)

leopard wrote:

used to play it a fair bit over lunch at college, four or five way games with three or four ships each taking about an hour or so.

?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!!

4 or 5 way game in an HOUR?!?!?! That is amazing. I could not do 2 ships in under 2 hours. What was your secret?

Amazing....
Duncan

Really no one is mentioning Dreadfleet hahahhahahahahahahaha

 heartserenade wrote:
Really no one is mentioning Dreadfleet hahahhahahahahahahaha

The problem with Dreadfleet is it's pretty limited. There's no realy 'build your own' fleet thing going on. From the people I've heard from that actually bought it, it was quite fun if very gamey.

heartserenade wrote:Dreadfleet lol.

heartserenade wrote:Really no one is mentioning Dreadfleet hahahhahahahahahahaha

Erm, you did. 5th post.