Dawn of Iron: The American Civil War at Sea

 From Facebook.

Last night at Boards and Swords Hobbies in Derby, UK Richard Robinson , Simon Clark and I had another practice through the participation game of Dawn of Iron we are taking to ‘The Other Partizan’ wargames show in Newark, UK on the 9th October.

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We have tried this twice before and the aim is to get a workable participation game lasting about 45 minutes with two participants. The show lasts six hours so we want to get as many players through as possible. So, we decided to limit the game to six turns. Last time we reduced the number of ships per side to two but we again tried three per side to give a variety of ship types, bearing in mind potential players will expect to see ironclads:

CSS Albemarle – Ironclad, CSS Arkansas – Light Ironclad and CSS Little Rebel – Cottonclad.

USS Benton – Light Ironclad, USS Cairo – Light Ironclad and USS Queen of the West – Cottonclad.

Both sides had a land battery.

The effective river bend scene is 4ft by 4ft with three sandbanks and we have reduced shallows to 2” wide. One thing we did do which is not in the rules, Mike Haught , is to dice off each turn to decide who activated a ship first.

Turn 1. General advance.

Turn 2. Arkansas was hit and suffered a Fire and Worsening Situation.

Turn 3. Arkansas later repaired Worsening Situation but took additional Fire, Flooding and Propulsion. Benton took a hit on its Gun Deck. Question for Mike Haught , we assumed that if you repaired a Cumulative Damage which caused a Hull Hit that the hull was thus repaired.

Turn 4. The Little Rebel was now going the wrong way round the large sandbank and engaged the shore battery. Otherwise although the fleets closed little damage was caused.

Turn 5. Albemarle rams Cairo at speed 2 and causes one Critical and one Cumulative. Arkansas causes one critical hit on QoWest and sails past it. Queen of the West does Hard to Port and rams Albemarle at speed 5 causing 2 Critical and one Cumulative taking one cumulative herself. The Albemarle is sunk.

Turn 6. Arkansas gives QoWest a broadside and sinks her. Little Rebel comes off the worst against the shore battery and is Derelict.

In conclusion a Union victory. This took us an hour and a half which is too long so we concluded that we had to reduce the sides to two ships each for Partizan. If you can come along it would be good to see you. We are on stand PG15 which is next to Syborg 3D’s stand T5 (who have Dave Manley’s ships) and more importantly the Cafeteria!