The Electronic Portable Wargame: At sea!

Inspired by Bob Cordery's 'Portable Naval Wargame' rules and Steven Page's 'Old Admirals' blog my latest diversion from getting started with tangible wargaming is a hexagon based web page game for pre-dreadnought battles, which can be found here. Here are some screenshots:

 

 

This game page uses a different method of controlling units than the previous ones. When you double-click on a unit a Control-Thingy (profpatpendingallrightspreserved) appears in its vicinity. Click on one of the arrows at the edge to change the facing of the unit:

Click on the circle at the centre of the Control-Thingy to edit the label of the unit:

You can enter the name of the ship, or add game information: HMS Beano has 6 gun dice, 9 flotation points and has not yet launched her port or starboard torpedoes. The label becomes visible when you place the mouse pointer over a unit.

The page has been sized to squeeze onto a 1260 by 1024 monitor using full screen browsing (F11), but can be made to fit on smaller screens by using the zoom out feature built into most browsers, <CTRL>-. I think you can go down two stops to 80% and the ships are still more or less visible.

The ship design is very cartoonish, reflecting my deep ignorance of the period, including Laputa style land gun batteries and bonus Martian fighting machines.

The page makes use of a JavaScript rotate image function, so there is only one image file for each unit that is rotated. Previous pages had four image files for each unit which were swapped between on a double-click. The new method makes hexagon based games practical as well as square based games where units have 45 degree facings.

I hope the page will allow people to enjoy and experiment with the Memoir of Battle at Sea rules. As with the previous pages I shall be using it to fight solo battles during brief pauses between my otherwise unstinting efforts at work.