Victory at Sea - Countering the lack of models

Following on from the disposal of my War at Sea collection and in advance of acquiring the 1/3000th replacements I was left with the small problem of representing ships for any projected solo games or even play tests. At a push I could have press ganged some of my completed Balkan Wars and WW1 models but that is hardly inspiring and even for my fertile imagination perhaps a step too far. I was pondering this dilemma when I rediscovered all the counters I had kept from the Victory at Sea WW2 naval rules published by Mongoose. The rules were largely unsuccessful in my opinion and I offloaded them some time ago but had kept all the counters. These are top down line drawings of many of the major ship classes from the US, UK, Italy, Germany, France and Japan – together with a lot of aircraft counters. The ships vary in scale but fit on a Hexon terrain tile easily enough. There is also a sheet of merchantmen and submarines should I be so inclined. Obviously these are no substitute for the models but they will suffice until I have some ready to use.

In fact, the aircraft counters will probably continue to serve even after I have the new 1/3000th collection – I have a cunning plan for this – as they cover many of the types I would have liked to have seen in the War at Sea range. I have a number of plastic flying bases used for such things as Aeronef and Battlefleet Gothic. These consist of a hexagonal base with a centre spindle upon which the model is placed. Some time ago I modified some of these by adding to the top of the spindle an inverted GW round flying base – this has a flat underside – with the intention being to use the flat surface as the base for whatever I wanted to put on it. I used some of these for the air groups from my scratch built Greek dirigible and they looked quite good. My plan now then is to put a square of magnetic strip on the top of the base and to stick the counters to some metal paper prior to cutting them out. This means I can use the same couple of dozen bases for any number and type of aircraft depending on the scenario and nationality. Simple but effective and all I will need to do is to paint up some flying bases and chop up the magnetic strip etc. It is quite likely then that I will have the air assets completed before I even take delivery of a single warship!