The (Unofficial) Great Battles of History

War Galley

Naval Warfare in the Ancient World

GBoH Home | Salamis | Rules Variant | Random Leaders

The GBoH system goes naval. Well, sort of. Given the differences between land and sea actions, War Galley shares no mechanics with the other games in the series (except the naval scenario in Caesar: Conquest of Gaul).

Since even series veterans must start learning from scratch, it's nice to be facing a 16-page rulebook rather than SPQR's 32-page tome. As you'd expect given the smaller length, the rules are less finicky and there's little of the "exceptionitis" that seems to plague other GBoH games. (I thought "oh no, here we go again" when one of the first pages differentiates between "facing change" and "change of direction" -- not an obvious distinction for turretless ships! -- but that lapse seemed to be unique.)

I'm happy to report that this game got a good development job. I suspect that even when the rules have been nitpicked by actual players that there will be less errata than there was for Caesar: Conquest of Gaul.

Even with the smaller rules there's plenty of action here. In the land games, units either missile fire or melee. Here, galleys can rake, ram, missile fire (sometimes including "fire" literally), and/or board. Depending on crew and marine quality (which are independent variables in this game) ships can be good at some of these tasks but rarely are good at all tasks. It is interesting to figure out how to get the best from your units.

There are two things in the game that I find a bit strange. The first (minor) item is the lack of state-specific OoB. Instead, you get a pool of "red" and "green" ships from which you create the scenario-specific OoB. This lowers the number of countersheets needed, but it's surprisingly generic for the GBoH series.

The second, and more important, strangeness is in the scale of the game. The scenarios range from 1 counter = 1 ship all the way to 1 counter = 10 ships. From a production standpoint, I understand why -- it makes those larger battles manageable in a reasonable amount of space and time. But I don't buy the applicability of a single set of rules across 1:1 and 1:10 scales. To see what I mean, take the Side scenario (which is 1:1) and convert it to 1:10. The Syrians will get 5 ships and the Rhodians get 4. Now how well does playing this model the original scenario? The level of detail (ram, rakes, lines) just isn't appropriate at 1:10.

War Galley includes a baker's dozen scenarios, making it a great value for the money. Those scenarios are: