On-Line Grogging: Flying Colors

The past couple weeks I've been playing in the on-line tournament of Flying Colors. For those of you not familiar with the game, its a rather low complexity wargame (i.e., about 15 pages of rules) focused on simulating fleet-level actions, while still allowing players to control individual ships. While the game is relatively simple as wargames go, there is still plenty of chrome and flavor within the game, with boarding actions, rakes, carronades, and the abilities of individual admirals all coming into play. Sadly, my favorite aspect of the genre, picking your ammunition type (e.g., grape shot, baby!) isn't under your control.

The heart of the game system is the command rules. Each fleet has one or more admirals, each with a command range. Ships in the fleet will either be in command, which means you can directly control them, or out of command, which means they'll go on autopilot for the turn. To keep things moving fast, there is no secret move plotting, with the action along the lines of players alternating moving their commands with the ability to interrupt for opportunity fire.

Anyway, this game in particular plays quite well over Vassal. The image above is one from a current game I'm playing, where I'm the British surrounded by the evil Dutch. Note the heavy damage on all the Dutch ships... If anyone has an interest in the age of the fighting sail and would like to schedule a game face-to-face or on-line, just comment here.