Warfare 2024

Just recovering from a long weekend spent at Warfare 2024 playing 'A Rum Do'. This was Prince Rupert's Gaming club's participation game and was this time set at sea.

It involved Prince Rupert's ship trying to pick up a spy from the isle of White. To do this the captain had to work out passwords so as not to alert the two parliamentarian ships in harbour. If he failed, the guard ships would stand to, if he failed again they would open fire.

The really clever bit I thought were the ship templates where the captains of the ships could allocate resources. This took the form of moving guns from port to starboard etc, controlling speed, manning fires and keeping a record of the ships hit points. These game elements were done by the use of pegs in a silhouette of the ship.

I had missed a lot of the games play testing so was none the wiser on the first day of the event. I soon picked it up though as it was nice and simple. It was really interesting to see the different tactics used by players in the game. I think the best games are when children play it as you can see just how much fun they are having.

The spy makes her way to the dock with valuable information of the location of the king. It's not good news for Rupert as it reveals the castle is too heavily protected for a rescue attempt.

A Parliamentarian captain runs to his ship.

The club also sported it's new shirts for the first time. It was nice to look more professional and tied us together more as a group.

A clever cribbage style system was used for keeping tabs of the state of the vessels.

It wasn't just the enemy ships Rupert had to worry about, a shore battery too stood guard over the bay.

The game played really well and the ship template idea was pure genius I thought. Unfortunately we didn't win any prizes this year as there were some truly amazing games in the competition. I think the first prize went to a mega Starlingrad game. As most of the other games were on the other side of the hall, we missed the giving out of prizes. They had been given out long before we realised we had missed it all. 

Regardless of this disappointing oversight, we all had a great couple of days laughing together and spending way too much.

Logo designed by Richard Brown. I was telling him how clever it was to use dice in the Rupert's standard. That's when he pointed out their numbering...1,6,4,5. Very nice.