Sky Galleons of Mars

Cast your mind back to 1988...

The Olympics have just taken place, but these were held in Seoul, not Paris.  In the cinema we were treated to classics like Beetlejuice, My Neighbour Totoro and Big (none of which I've ever actually seen).  TV saw the launch of delights such as Count Duckula, Whose Line is it Anyway and Red Dwarf.  In the news the despicable Section 28 was introduced and Edwina Currie crashed the UK egg market (proving that useless Tories weren't confined to the most recent batch)

And in a slightly grotty flat in SW London, 2 young Scottish flatmates splashed their hard earned cash on a new boardgame... Sky Galleons of Mars. (No idea what we paid for it... I suspect more than we could afford... but according to an advert in Dragon magazine from 1988 it cost $24).

Sadly when we went our separate ways a year or so later the game went with my friend John and is now either lost or living with him in Australia, and I never got a chance to play it again... until now...

eBay decided that I really needed to see this copy was up for sale (by a local charity) and I snapped it up for a bargain price.  They had said in the ad that they weren't sure if it was complete and sure enough, it was missing a pretty key component... the rules!  But all the other bits were there including the ship models and the 2 lovely maps.  The original rules, combined with the Cloudships and Gunboats expansion which attempt to bridge the gap between the game and the RPG version Space 1889, are available as a pretty cheap pdf form Wargames Vault so all was good.

So after a pause of 36 years I managed to get the game on the tableagainst my friend Anthony... how did it play?  Pretty well.  We skipped the 1st couple of introductory scenarios (possibly  mistake... I'd worried that the game would be over too quickly but it's actually quite hard to sink (?... maybe not the right term for a flying ship) the ships quickly and I think we'd have been fine. 

In scenario #3 the Prussians are intercepting an unarmed merchant ship carrying a defecting diplomat...unfortunately for the Prussians the British have sent along a couple of gunboats for his protection.  The Merchant ship is simply an objective... the Prussians have to board it for a turn and then sail off the table.  Handily it will come to a halt if it receives any hits so I didn't have to chase it around the table.

The 2 British gunboats closed to short range pretty quickly and although most of their guns weren't able to cause a lot of damage to the better armoured Prussian Cruiser, they were causing a lot of hits in the crew and I was in danger of running out of deckhands to swab the deck.  This was a problem because I needed to have enough Marines left to board the Merchant ship and to fend off any British boarding attempts.  The British had few other options though apart from gunning down the crew or hoping for a critical hit... even these aren't too devastating.  There didn't seem to be what Anthony described as the 'Hood Option' which is a relief as you don't want to lose a ship on an unlucky dice throw.  After several turns we'd reached the end of the evening... the Prussians were alongside the Merchant ship with the Marines on standby although repeatedly failing to grapple it.  The British cruisers were looking on, firing onto the deck of the cruiser and hoping I'd run out of Marines.  I think with a couple more turns I'd have grabbed the disloyal diplomat and made it off the table.

The rules themselves hold up pretty well.  It's a fairly straightforward turn sequence... the side with initiative (usually determined by a dice throw) moves and then both sides can fire.  Shooting is allowed in either players phase but each gun can only fire once.  Ships operate at a range of altitudes and hull damage gradually reduces this until you reach ground level.  Hits are either on hull, crew, guns or cause a critical but, as mentioned, these are annoying rather than devastating. We never got to boarding but each player has to commit x number of troops to forming a boarding party which means they aren't available for other actions... confusingly the dice mechanics for boarding are different to the format for everything else which threw me a bit.

As we were only on scenario 3 we missed a large chunk of the rules.  The rules are reasonably well played out although there was a bit of flicking back and forth to check details, although this was probably due to my bad memory more than anything else.

They definitely fulfilled that nostalgia itch and I'll play them again.  It'd be interesting to see how Martian kites compare with the Earth steam powered ships.  It's also inspired me to revisit the whole Aeronef genre.  I'd bought and painted a couple of small fleets years ago but then decided I'd never use them and they went off to eBay, but I can see myself repeating the while thing again!