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http://www.capitangames.com/trireme-commander/

For reasons I can only dimly fathom, I quite suddenly developed an overpowering hankering for ancient adventure on the high seas. And strangely enough Captain Games has just put out a new rule set that ... and here is the really eerie part ... focuses on "skirmish" type engagements with 10mm MDF galleys rather than massive fleet battles with scores of tiny white metal squadrons. I say "eerie" because this level of play is generally what I prefer, at least when it comes to land games, but most of what's out there for ancient naval combat is larger in scale of play and smaller in scale of miniatures.

So has anyone heard of this? Seen it? Read it? Played it? How about just interested?

I've played a fair bit of ancient galley warfare using rules such as Ram Speed and Periplous, which are both relatively large scale fleet rules using 1/1200 scale models.

I've never heard of this set, it must be too new.

While ancient naval battles sometimes involved very large numbers of ships, there must also have been a lot of small scale engagements similar to the kind of frigate actions seen in Napoleonic warfare, which however failed to get written up in history books. Therefore there definitely is scope for a small scale game with larger, more detailed ship models.

I think Trireme Commander just came out this past June. I have ordered a copy and will likely write up an overview as/when.

I am not sure why you could not have masses of 10mm Triremes, Quinqueremes, and Deceremes in an Ancient Naval Warfare game.

I love that period.

I have always wondered why more people are not making 15mm Triremes to go with their 15mm Ancients, or simply to use for Naval Combat.

I think there are a few 15mm ancient boats out there. Old Glory does a few, for example:

http://www.oldgloryminiatures.com/products.asp?cat=380

Of course you could have massive battles of anything really as long as you have the space and the funding.

BeAfraid wrote:
I am not sure why you could not have masses of 10mm Triremes, Quinqueremes, and Deceremes in an Ancient Naval Warfare game.

I love that period.

I have always wondered why more people are not making 15mm Triremes to go with their 15mm Ancients, or simply to use for Naval Combat.

Some ancient naval battles involved hundreds of ships. The low end of estimates for Salamis is 300 ships on each of the two sides. The size and expense of 10mm or 15 mm models would make it impractical to use more than a fraction of the numbers.