Row, Sink or Crash: my SCRUMCON Game Event

Greek and Etruscan gallies row for their lives in the Mediterranean Sea!

As you might know by now, SCRUMCON, the Scrum Club’s local gaming convention, will be expanding to two days this year and will be a the same location as last year, at the  Silver Spring Civic Center, Silver Spring MD, on 29-30 March. Details and registration here.

Last ScrumCon, I ran a game of OGRE MINIATURES. I think it went well.

This convention, I am trying something different. I have always liked naval games, but I lean towards niche subjects like obscure naval engagements in the 19th and 20th centuries. My other favorite periods are age of sail and the naval engagements with Rowed Galleys from ancient naval battles with Greece, Rome, and Carthage. One of my favorite rule sets for the period is GREEKS AT SEA, home rules by Brian Dewitt. Why? Because it’s simple— simple to teach, simple to execute, and I can run it to complete victory conditions in a short three hour time frame, for the most part. Perfect for a convention or game day. As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of my Plague Projects* was to print off 3d prints of Ancient galley ships. First it was 1:600 scale ships from Voxelhaus but I switched gears when another creator, Twilite Games, started making 1:300 scale galley STL files. I liked the smaller STL files just fine and printed a bunch of them, but the Twilite Games files were actually big enough to hold little crew figures (6mm big) on top. Since I wanted that cool visual effect (and Marines and Archers are a thing in Greeks at Sea), I switched to the larger scale STL file and and commenced making a large collection of 3d Printed galleys from various empires. I have somewhere between 60 and 70 done now, of various nationalities. I have also picked up a collection of random 6mm figures from various sources (mostly Rapier Miniatures and an Etsy manufacturer named Ronin Krafts). I’m not deliberately shopping for any specific nation or time frame– just period looking melee weapons for the marines and archers or slingers for the Missile troops. In general, the Marines are a mix of dark red, metallic and leather in color the Archers/Slingers/Javelin tossers are wearing green outfits. I’ve painted up a bunch of them. The result, I think, looks pretty great!

Greek Pentakonter with 2 Archers firing at grappled enemy

Zoom out view, taken before Boarding Melee occurred.

I’ve played Greeks at Sea in the past, at HMGS conventions, and I’m convinced this is a good system to play fast– it’s easy, it focuses on the fun stuff, and it’s not hard to figure out who won or lost. Brian Dewitt isn’t a commercial publisher (that I’m aware of) but will gladly sell you a CD of a ruleset for a few bucks. My choices for running a convention game were either this or the legendary RAM SPEED— an ancient (but very worthy) microgame from the now extinct Metagaming Concepts from Austin TX (who once had a young game designer named Steve Jackson on the payroll). Ram Speed is great, and can adapt to miniatures easily, but it’s clunky here and there and demonstrates its 1980 origins in places. Greeks at Sea, by contrast, has minimal mechanics, plays mostly with chits and ten sider dice, and resolves quickly. I took the game out for a test run at the NOVAG Game Day and chose an intro scenario for six players: The Naval Battle of Alalia 535 BC. This is a fun intro to the system that features fewer, better crewed, Greek Pentakonters versus more Etruscan (Italian) Pentakonters that have more mediocre crews. It played well at Game Day, but a few changes needed to be made.

First Issue: more shooty units, please

For one thing, it’s too boring to not have archers (though the scenario calls for none), so I have added a few ships that have archers that are roughly Bireme sized on both sides. Why not? The rules are simple enough. If you lose all your marines by getting killed by archer fire, you can’t board. Oh, dame fortune!

Second Issue: The tiny dude problem with Pentakonters

Note that the models are 1/300 and the soldier minis are 6mm. So they can be awkard to “ride” on ships that don’t have a lot of flat surfaces, just like the Etruscan Pentakonters. They were essentially trading vessels jury rigged for combat so they lacked the Greek fighting deck (Flat surface). What did I do? I jury rigged a magnetic mount for every ship in my collection and now the minis stay on just fine.

Game Day Feb 2024 game

This is my ScrumCon Scenario, so I had high hopes for it, and thankfully we got enough players (I had to take a position).

The Naval Battle of Alalia, starting positions (Etruscans l, Greeks r). Each player ran between 2-4 ships depending on the side. The Etruscans had a couple more galleys but their Marines fought at a minus.

Each ship has a (small) sheet associated with it. It’s just there to measure fatique and crew hits. Mostly this is for you as a player because things can get confusing out on the table. The boxes and cups at the end of the table contain speed and initiative counters. You maintain a “Hand” of speed counters and draw initiative counters every turn. Then you place the initiative at the front of the vessel along with your speed (face down) and the move the speed from the previous turn to the stern of the vessel. The GM (me) calls the numbers, and when your number is called, you flip your initiative and speed for this turn counters. The ships move and perform actions (combat, boarding, missile fire, putting out fires, etc) in initiative order. Then you discard last turn’s speed counter. When the ships have all moved and performed actions, the turn is over and you toss the initiative counter back into the draw cup.

Gradually, the fleets come together, and this is where I thought we needed to add archers.

As the ships get within one movement turn’s worth of distance, you can see the sides lining up on each other for ramming and boarding attacks.

It’s looking grim for the tale end of the greek line up there

Greeks (yellow) are moving in formation to break the Etruscan line. The Etruscans are having none of this and line up on individual ships for a Conga line of pain! (that’s my pentakonter in the foreground) You can see how I had problems standing up crew figures on the Etruscan pentakonters. This has been fixed, even if I have jury rigged a very ahistorical looking solution.

At the far end of the line, my fellow Etruscans were more succesful than I was, equipping themselves well and trying to lap around the Greek sea dogs. First one, then another, had a broadside ram on some unlucky Greeks. The Etruscans took out a Greek Galley but got stuck in it, dragging the Etruscan galley to a watery grave with it. Yikes! Another galley was damaged so much it ended up sinking, and at that point, Etruscans were actually leading the allegedly better Greek fleet by 2 points.

This is where I was glad I took the extra step of putting brightly colored number sheets on the ship hulls (pink for Etruscans, yellow for Greeks). The fleets got mixed in pretty well and It could have been confusing. You can see a little of how the mechanics work in this photo. Obviously the Initiative 3 ship (my Pentakonter, bottom right, pink sticker) has gone on the 3rd initiative round. So has the one directly above it, they were both 3s. The one marked 4 has just flipped his initiative and will move speed 3. The Bireme four hexes above him is initaitive 6 and hasn’t gone yet– his speed for this turn is still face down. See how that works?

To speed things up a bit, another ship on both sides were lost to ramming and sinking damage. The Etruscans lost another ship. Both sides were even up. Then, this happened

The Etruscans (l) ram and impale the Greek bireme, rolling hot. Even though they are outnumbered by one crewman, they throw caution to the wind and board the impudent Greek upstart. Again, they are rolling hot this round and they massacre the Greek marines and capture the ship, causing a 5-4 victory over Greece. The victory threshold was five galleys sank or capture either side.

Ironically, this was kind of a historical result. The Etruscans killed more Greeks but somewhat crippled their commercial trading fleet for a season or two and by that time, the Greeks were dominating the seas. The players were effusive in praise but I kept careful notes about what went right and what went wrong. I fixed the tiny sailor problem, and i’m adding archers for the ScrumCon game. If you are interested in this battle, it can be a lot of fun and it plays fast. here it is on the Scrum Con Website. Sign up for a ticket today!

The Naval Battle of Alalia 535 BC (sign up for tickets, you will need a ScrumCon badge first

‘*Plague Project: any one of many projects I started during the COVID pandemic, to keep from going nuts.