Final DANG Preparations

I'm working on the final preparations for DANG (Dave's Annual Naval Game), which is set for Thursday (December 27). Right now I'm getting the final campaign paperwork together and organizing the gaming materials. I expect spend most of Wednesday setting up the play area (moving tables, chairs, etc.) and doing some last minute cooking for snacks.It should be a good time.

My only miniatures work for this year was putting together some gunboats that could be used as minor ships for convoys. The gunboats are done, however I didn't add oars to all of them (I did the first five and decided that was enough, I guess I can always come back to it later). Here are some photos of the final results

The Gunboat Flotilla (Mark's original two are in the front row, second and third from the left)

My lugger rigged gunboat (left) with Mark's original (right)

My lateen rigged gunboat (left) with Mark's original (right)

An oared gunboat and one without

I think the gunboats turned out okay. Not as nice as Mark's originals, but good enough for gaming. They probably won't see any action in the DANG game, but I do have plans to use them for other games.

I previously mentioned that the game will use the Sail and Steam Navies rules, with some modifications to cover the Age of Sail. For those of you that have been asking about the changes, I finally compiled all my notes into one document that covers the modifications. You can download a PDF of the modifications here (Note: you will still need a copy of Sail and Steam Navies to use them). The PDF also includes a modified quick reference card, but you can download it as a separate PDF here. If you want to try out some of the battles, I also created a file with the ships from the DANG Lord of the Lakes game (the file includes the major ships operating on Lake Ontario during 1813). You can get that file here. The ship logs were created with the templates from the Sail and Steam Navies Yahoo group and all the linked files are posted to that group. Comments about the rule modifications are welcome.

I'll put up the after-action report from DANG later this week and I have a couple book reviews I want to post before the end of the year.