Russo-Japanese War: Quickfire Playtest

Regular readers will know that I have something of a passion for pre-dreadnought naval warfare.  I've played War Times Journal's Battlefleet 1900 for many years now.  I have a fairly extensive range of 1:2400 ships from Tumbling Dice, and there are a couple of battle reports on this blog.  There are some in 1:2400, and some in 1:3000 using WTJ's own models.

I recently had a surge of inspiration to run another campaign, after the success of the naval aspect of our Russo-Japanese War campaign from last year.  However, I decided to give WTJ's alternate rules called Quickfire a try.  Quickfire is a lot like Battlefleet, except the rules are streamlined considerably.  You lose a lot of detail, which is what put me off it for a while, but it makes handling fleets much more manageable and it's also a lot more attractive to new players without any background knowledge.

So, last week Ian and Mike gave the rules a playtest!  Just a few pictures for flavour:

The Russian fleet sets sail.  The rules are very easy to pick up - I explained them to the guys in ten minutes.  It's one of those games where you have a tracker card and damage charts, so as long as you know the turn structure you have everything you need right in front of you, with no need for a rulebook.

The Izumo and Shikishima set off!  One of my favourite things about the game is that all the ships are unique, with their stats dirived from real world values using a series of formulae available on the website.  This means each ship handles differently, and is a very good reflection of its real-world capabilities, while still being a simple system.

Cruiser Izumrud in the foreground.  In our test game, she took an absolute pounding from heavy guns until she was basically a floating wreck, but stubbornly refused to sink and even managed to get a single gun into action late in the game.  It was a considerable distraction, but was eventually sunk by gunfire.

Both sides played well, but Mike was cursed with some staggeringly unlucky rolls (five misses in a row!) which allowed the Pallada to be sunk very quickly.  The Russians were fighting an uphill struggle after that.

The Shikishima and Knyaz Suvorov ended up locked in a gunnery duel at a range of a little over a mile.  The Russians hung on and came perilously close to sinking the Japanese battleship, but in the end it was two against one and the Russian flagship went down in flames.

A hugely satisfying game.  Not to criticise Battlefleet, but the same game would have taken three hours and a great deal of explaining.  This was over in an hour, and I barely needed to step in and explain the rules after Turn One.

So what's the plan?  As you know I have a number of ongoing projects at the moment, not least my Epic Imperial Guard army which is due an update.  However, I did blow my Christmas money on four fleets for Quickfire, as well as a fantastic new uniform.  This will probably end up being an alternate history Supercampaign - British and French vs. Russians and Germans, October 1904.  I will be getting in touch with those foolish enough to have expressed an interest in Supercampaigns in the past to see if they want to be kings and ministers!

Anyway, all the best.  My regular posting schedule will return to normal soon (these are all 'scheduled posts'). I'll be writing a bit about that next month and some big changes I have coming up that will definitely affect my modelling schedule - hopefully positively!

Ed