Wargaming Largesse and a Delicious Dilemma

A profile shot - ‘purely representational’ and sadly lacking a spanker on the mizzenmast. Two decks worth of gunports which will cover most of what I will need.

The view forward….

….and aft.

The selection of colours available.

The overall size.

The hexed board is from the board game ‘Fighters of the Pacific’ and is a perfect match for the size for the model.

OK, in the interests of full disclosure I have been thinking long and hard about age of sail gaming using, shock horror, models - although I have several really good board game solutions if necessary.

A chance email exchange with all round good guy, prolific painter and champion of all things Portable, Mark Cordone, touched on a potential idea that was struggling to be realised thanks to geography and the price of overcoming it! Let me explain. I had seen a whole pile of plastic ‘Risk’ style gaming pieces that seem to be readily available in the good ol’ US of A but would cost a King’s ransom to ship to the UK. In this case I am talking about fully rigged men of war from the halcyon days of Nelson, Suffren, John Paul Jones and others - add in Hornblower and Aubrey and you will get the general idea.

Anyways, to cut a long story short (as Spandau Ballet once said), Mark very kindly sent me a package of 50 of the models you see above.

Are they perfect? No. Are they accurate? Again, no. BUT - they are (very) hard plastic and are designed as playing pieces with a modest footprint. 

Looking long and hard at these my first thought is that a spanker on the mizzenmast would prove the look immeasurably. This would be east enough to organise. Being a two deck ship is handy but I am already thinking about how to cut the hull down so that a single deck frigate would be an option - also increasing the height of the hull so that three decked first rate ships can be represented.

Chopping these about will be a lot easier than building them from scratch and as the models are very basic I reckon that a paint job would cover a multitude of sins.

There is a huge amount of potential with these models which I hope to fully explore - Mark mentioned that he had experimented with some steamship versions, removing a mast and adding a funnel -  so lets see where this idea can go.

I have a couple of ideas to play around with but for now let me once again extend my grateful thanks to Mark Cordone - I hope he will appreciate what he has unleashed!