A short review of Sails of Glory.

I am going to give a quick review Sails of Glory is a games made by Ares Games. I am not going to go through every turn of our first battle, we did a few things incorrectly and as always you learn a little more with every play through.   The games components are of a very high standard.  The starter kit comes with four ships.

There are also add on ships that one can buy.  The add on ships come with a base, stat cards and maneuver cards.

The above photo shows your damage track, your actions, what sail your are under(Full/Half /Battle/Anchor) and whether you are loading or have loaded guns.  Each ship receives a certain number of actions denoted by the hands along the top of  the card and as your ship takes damage.  The ship has less actions available as the ship receives damage.  One can see the damage on the following photo. 

The following photo shows what actions that are available.

There are raise sail and lower sail actions.  One can shoot Ball, Double shot, Grape Shot and Chain Shot just to name a few.  One pre-plots maneuvers two turns in advance.  There are three sets of maneuver cards, one for no damage to your ship's mast, one for having a mast/masts down and for heading into the wind.

Here are some photos of the game, the only thing Ted did to the miniatures was to put a wash on the sails to bring out some of the detail.

Now for my impressions, it was a blast.  The rules are straight forward and one can choose how detailed they want the game to be.  With plotting your maneuver cards in advance, it makes one really think a bit.  The British players actually struck one another.   One has to decide what actions your are going to do.   And at the beginning of one turn, Ted the owner of the game plotted the port side guns to fire, oops.  His partner Gene in the other ship had maneuvered onto Ted's port-side between Ted and a British ship.  Gene's ship got a shot of double ball, ouch.  It really is a lot of fun.  We played the game in a couple of hours and it felt as if we had played for twenty minutes.  When time passes that quickly, that is a pretty good indication that it was a fun game.  I also believe that it would be a great convention game.   Each player getting one ship which would move the game along.  It takes a while for a ship to get whittled down to being ineffective so a convention player would not be done in a half hour.

Thank You for Reading.

Mike

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