Shove Off, Gridley!
Quick-Play Pre-Dreadnought Naval Wargame Rules
What is it? Shove Off, Gridley!, or SOG, is a set of naval miniatures rules covering the Pre-Dreadnought period. The game is intended to be fast playing, easy to learn, and fun, while still doing a decent job as a realistic simulation. The simulation model used works best for recreating naval combat in the 1880's and 1890's, but as a game it can be used for scenarios set as early as the American Civil War in the 1860's and as late as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.
Like the rest of my game designs posted here on Irvania.com, SOG will be a freebie download. I'm doing this for the fun of it.
Theory/history of the design: This ruleset began life as three separate projects: first, I wanted to look into converting the old Metagaming board wargame Fire When Ready. Second, Dick Wilkins from my old game group in New Jersey had asked me to do a Pre-Dreadnought naval game based on my spaceship rules, Red Chicken Rising. Third, several discussions years ago on the Internet (probably on the NavWarGames mailing list on Yahoogroups) revolved around the fact that most naval engagements prior to the Russo-Japanese War took place at about 2000 yards or less, and I wanted to write a set of rules based around that concept.
After a couple of months of tinkering I decided that the three different projects were really leading to the same end result. I ended up dropping the Fire When Ready connection since I felt it worked well as a microgame but didn't work well as a set of miniature rules. If you're a Red Chicken Rising player, you'll probably notice that SOG has a number of similarities with RCR but they've evolved along very different lines.
That notion of naval engagements in the period taking place at 2000 yards or less is the central theme of SOG. In most naval rules, including most of my own earlier naval projects, gamers are allowed to open fire at maximum theoretical range. In real life, at least in the 1880's and 1890's, the available gun aiming technology was not capable of reliably hitting anything beyond a couple of thousand yards. The shells would be able to fly much farther than that, but the gunners couldn't hit anything, so admirals and captains did not allow gunfire at long range on the grounds that it was a waste of ammunition. Doctrine, not ballistics, kept the range down.
Status update: The first playtest, in August 2008, went well. It generated a lot of very good feedback and as a direct result I have a fairly long list of improvements to make. Most of the changes are in the nature of rearranging information on the player sheet and making some new play aids. There are a few details in the rules I need to hammer out, but overall I'm pretty happy with the system.
The main thing left to be done is to write the rulebook itself. Other than that, I need to tidy up the player sheets and game aid sheets based on feedback from the first playtest, and then start making new ship sheets.
The ship sheets take a while to do, partially because of the overhead ship illustration, so I'll be posting collections of new ship sheets as I get them done.
Playtest photos:- First playtest game in Scranton PA, 2 August 2008
- Player and Referee Sheets (August 2008 version; 52K)
- US Ship Sheets (August 2008 version; 377K)
- Spanish Ship Sheets (August 2008 version; 587K)
Last updated: December 1, 2008