The League of Augsburg

Panorama of the icy ending to the scenario

Last evening, Colin and I played Fog of War – the 4Play scenario for the Battle of Hudson’s Bay, 1697. It is unusual because the fighting takes place amidst the pack ice and in a thick fog. The mechanisms for contact in the fog produce ship disorientation and repositioning relative to other ships.

Initial forces - two ships each

Bad die throws whilst...

The campaign covering a single calendar month in 1652 when a small Royalist squadron under Prince Rupert ventured into the Tropics in search of funding sources to continue the king's war to recover his throne, has lasted for several months of real time. We are in the closing few days and the climax is nigh. 

I had no fixed plot line for this gaming journey and it has written itself through the...

Clarence Harrison- No! Really! We have nearly reached the summit of this mountain. We have one final chat scheduled within days and a final walk through. A few minor tweaks and we can send this project off to the printer! Weighing in at 180 pages, this tome is all you need (apart from a small fleet of model ships... have we mentioned we offer those, too?) to launch your bid for supremacy of the...

Héros close in during the heat of the action!

Although co-architect of the attack on the stranded English slaver Temperance, Rupert was prevented from playing anything but the role of spectator on account of a strong north westerly wind. Thomas Darbyshire, master of the grounded vessel, used his long experience at sea to make the best of a difficult position. Lying high and dry in an extremely...

Off the Bakendik Bolong, Rupert attacks the stranded Temperance.

Eight days (15 turns) into the campaign, we are at the 25% mark. It has been an eventful journey so far and the Royalists are no further than four miles from the mouth of the Gambia River. They have had two encounters with Berber pirates coming off worst in the first encounter and being mere spectators to a French victory in the...

The campaign has a full and detailed narrative which accompanies the turn by turn mechanics. All of the narrative is based on events which happen in the table-top wargames combined with the role-play conversations and the umpire controlled activities. 

So far, the narrative runs to over 5,000 words for the first ten turns. Below is an extract from 5th March, five days into the campaign and it...

We've recently begun a campaign recreating the adventures of the itinerant Royalist Fleet on the West African coast in 1652. Under Prinz Ruprecht von der Pfalz known more commonly in Engish as Rupert of the Rhine, a small battered squadron 'privateered' between the Islas Cabo Verde and The Gambia for some weeks. 

Campaign Map

I have manipulated a few facts but nothing too outrageous. We have...

Being just one of millions hit by the blight makes me nothing special. Some of my friends have had it three times. All I can say is that my usual drive to get things done disappeared for over two weeks and a couple of sobering visits to the local hospital led me to even more admiration for health care professionals and calibrated my expectations about going to bed early and having less energy than...

If you don't know much about the Four Days Battle of 1666 there is a hole in your life! This epic sea battle between the Restoration English Navy and that of the Dutch Republic involved a massive number of ships - around 160, over 40,000 men and in excess of 9,000 guns. It was fought over four days (hence the name!) with some fighting also happening at night.

It is crammed full of desperate...