Saturday, December 30, 2006
Games Workshop’s Man O War Revisited
Miniatures Games
My gaming group engaged in a bit of nostalgia this past week as we each delved into the deepest recesses of our basements and dredged out our copies of Games Workshop’s Man O’ War.
The game was a hoot. We had forgotten just how much fun it was to play. Our scenario was a fairly pedestrian meeting engagement, with elves and dwarves on one side, and chaos, dark elves and orcs on the other; six fleets in all. The bad guys won.
For those not in the know, Man O’ War is a fleet battle game set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It was published in 1993 as a large boxed game, and then later was expanded with two boxed supplements, Plague Fleet, and Sea of Blood.
It was—and remains—one of GW two or three best efforts. The base game and supplements all came out within a short period of time, avoiding the typical GW problem of power creep. Each of the fleets is well balanced against the other, and through numerous playings, each has won and lost equally.
Each of the fleets is pegged to obvious characteristics of the various races. The dwarves have ironclads; the elves speedy catamarans; the orcs have barely seaworthy hulks cobbed together from various worky bits; the Dark Elf “fleet” is composed mostly of sea serpents. There also were fleets for the Empire, Bretonnians, Skaven, Chaos Dwarves, Nurgle, Khorne, Tzeentch, Norse and Pirates. Most of the fleets had some sort of “flyer” in addition to the ships, enabling “carrier warfare” scenarios. The system was rounded out with magic and some very cool sea monsters.
The approximate scale of the fleets is 1/1200 (as far as we can tell), but several of the ships in each fleet are probably out of scale—especially the flyers.
Movement in the game is very simple and would fail most tests of seamanship. They get it right that sailing craft can’t go directly into the wind, but then ruin it by insisting that they go faster with the wind directly astern.
For combat, each ship has a template that shows a profile fo the ship marked with numbered locations. To shoot, you roll a number of dice depending on the weapon, and then match the die results to the locations. Each roll that matches a location has scored a hit. Saves are then attempted, and if failed, a damage market is placed on the location. Multiple hits on a location can cause critical hits (Most ships go down because of critical hits).
Each of the fleets have unique weapons systems that add much flavor to the game. The Orcs, for example, have a ship called the Drilla Killa, which is a barge with a large drill on the front (a team of orcs is inside running on a treadmill to get it going). When the Drilla comes into contact with an enemy, you roll a dice. Sometimes the Killa drills a hole through the enemy, and sometimes it sinks itself in the attempt.
To speed play and make things neater, we have photocopied the templates and placed them in plastic sheet protectors. Grease pencils are used to mark damage. This eliminates the problem of the fiddly counters.
As I said before, it’s a tremendously fun game, and we wondered why we don’t do it more often.
It was sad that GW killed the game after only a couple of years. But it’s easy to understand why. The very thing that makes it so good also doomed it. Man O War was a closed system. You didn’t need a lot of ships to play, and there wasn’t much room for expansion.You could buy all of the fleets for a very reasonable price (two of us have multiples of every ship cast.) Thus, GW couldn’t continue to make a profit by constantly adding to, and expanding the fleets. One you had the fairly limited set, you really didn’t need any more.
If you don’t have the game, and you have some money to bury, I would recommend seeing what you can pick up on Ebay.
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i didn’t need a lot of ships to play, and there wasn’t much room for expansion.You could buy all of the fleets for a very reasonable price
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