Archive for the 'Admiral’s Order' Category

They’re at it again.  Yes, the brilliantly (mentally) enourmous scope of Admiral’s Order is back again but this year it has a slightly smaller version of the game.

Last year, I posted about Admiral’s Order as it looked superb but was (sadly) on a scale way larger than I could play.  A game of ship-to-ship warfare with dozens of hand-made wooden ships all with their names burned onto their sides and enough ships to re-create some of the largest naval battles you can think of.  When I saw it in person at Spiel last year, it really did look great.

This year’s game is “Admiral’s Order: All Hands!” which uses the same rules as the previous game but All Hands comes with ‘only’ 36 ships and 5 different scenarios.  It can be played as a stand-alone game so is kind of an ‘entry-level’ version of the larger game (although I use the term ‘entry level’ very much in the context of Admiral’s Order, so that’s still pretty complex/detailed compared to other games).

Like the original game and expansion, All Hands is hand-made with wooden ships, wooden box, and wooden tokens, so the same production values have been applied.

I believe rules for solo play are being (or have already been) released too. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many gamers, I’m always looking for the grail of wargames – an epic-feeling, tactical game with detail, potential for real strategy, limited luck-based elements, and that plays in just a few hours with simple rules.  Admiral’s Order may not tick all those boxes, but the grand scale of it makes me want to find the time to be able to play it.

The part that appeals to me is the tactical play of creating lines of ships, and turning and positioning them to attack the enemy – the sort of thing you see in historical documentaries (and what I was so bad at doing when I played Battlefleet Gothic many years ago).  As you would expect, the wind direction plays an important role in your manoeuvres too.

Players take control of dozens of ships of the line in different naval battles from 1775 – 1815.  The base game contains 74 hand-made ships which do look very cool.  There is a lot of detail in the game including each ship’s status being tracked individually.  The game’s web site says a battle between two frigates may take a couple of hours so playing time seems to be quite long.  The expansion that is available adds a further 60 ships so you can play out the whole Battle of Trafalgar, although it does say that would take an entire weekend!  Totally bonkers, but it’s the kind of crazy I admire.

Read the rest of this entry »