Battle of the Yalu River 1894 1/2400 scale

 I ran a game at my local wargame club this eve for the first time. I've posted some comments on the A and A Game Engineering ruleset 'Tsushima' before. It's a good game, a notch above beer and pretzel in terms of complexity and rather traditional in that it uses tables and modifiers etc. 

I don't have quite the order of battle for the Yalu River battle of the Sino-Japanese war but my fleet is fairly close. I am missing one of the two better Chinese Battleships and about 3 of the Japanese cruisers. The fleets themselves are the right size as I have a few extra gun boats and light cruisers as substitutes. 

Still the setup is quite easy. The Chinese deploy between two islands at the mouth of the Yalu, the Japanese approach from the south west.

Taken from Wikipedia

I had four players and gave them 2-3 squadrons each. I skipped the scouting phase as I wanted the battle to play out in around 3 hours and the table size was a bit smaller than the recommended 6/4. This was a good decision, the players shot away at each other for around 6-7 turns and sunk or set on fire about 75% of each fleet. Simplifying the rules was also a good idea. I tend to think 'Tsushima' is pretty simple but for pick up games there is usually someone who has a lower crunch threshold than me.

Probably the Japanese manoeuvred a little better, but the Chinese battleships do hit hard and their player rolled pretty well. I did make some simplifications; I ignored the evasive manoeuvre rules, these add lots of rerolls and slow the game down. I also allowed sinking ships to continue shooting whilst they attempted repairs. I probably should not have allowed this with hindsight. It probably made the game too fire friendly. 

From a simulation point of view I'd give the game a 6/10. Extreme historical outcomes are rarely reflected in wargame results. The Japanese creamed the Chinese fleet for no lost ships (some damaged) and the historical battle lasted around 5 hours with around 10-30% losses. In our game 6  six minute turns resulted in about 10 ships sunk and another 10 on fire spread evenly between the two sides. The game rules were more deadly, even without my rules changes to force the action.

It does look real good on the table top. The smoke and splash markers really give that fire on the horizon look. 

The smoke markers wire wool superglued to washers, then sprayed and dry brushed. The splash markers are small screws covered in polyfiller then 'sculpted' with some tweezers and then painted with blue contrast paint and greys.

Going forward I could see this being ran again. I will probably buy some more ships at some point. I am leaning towards the French fleet from 1890s-1910s because it was a total mishmash of nuts designs. There aren't many historical battles to simulate in this period outside Yalu River and Tsushima, so I would be doing fictional events or going back to the 1880s for the Sino-French war.