December 11th, 2009 | 
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Tonight, the Bengal Club will be attempting a retry of Plastic Ships & Iron Men — wherein we use the old Wooden Ships & Iron Men rules, a hex mat, and WizKid’s Pirates of the Spanish Main (etc) ships.
Some of us have actual scale model ships, a la “Ship of the Line”, but there’s nothing easier and more convenient than just punching out some ships of the wide variety available in the “Pirates” line and whipping up a battle.
For those who don’t have a copy of the old WS&IM rules, Hasbro has made them available at their website here.
Note that this PDF is missing page 7, so you can find that here. The log sheets here, the counters here, and the advanced tables here.
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Turns out we had a great time. We ran two battles; one was a French 74 with a French 32-gun frigate (crack crews) versus three British 32-gun frigates, as our ship-of-the-line Captain believed he would be blown out without the extra ship — he wasn’t; they caused all three to strike in short order, as the 74’s range and weight of metal was overwhelming.
So we re-ran the game, this time a British 74 (crack) against five French 32-gunners with average crews. The game went almost 20 turns; the Brit finally had to strike when the last remaining frigate managed to clear the last of the sail from the 74 – and with only 2 hull boxes left on the frigate. It was an amazingly close-run thing, and frankly I’m not certain that the French wouldn’t have had to scuttle 2-3 of their struck ships just to raise the necessary prize-crew for the 74.
The club has decided that this is the manner in which we will, in future, decide all naval combat in our Pirates campaign, as the other rules we were using suck.