Once upon a Time in the West Indies

I was up in the loft this morning to find some camping kit for number one son, so took the opportunity to rummage in the wargames rules box that I have stashed up there. A quick bit of digging turned up an old copy of Pete Berry's Once Upon a Time in the West Indies pirate rules, which are a supplement for the similarly entitled '....West Country' skirmish rules for the English Civil War period.

What I had failed to appreciate and had completely forgotten is that the booklet contains a very simple set of pirate ship rules, which look exactly like the thing I've been looking for. The movement and firing system is based on a dot to dot grid marked out on the playing surface, which is pretty simple but doesn't include the effect of the wind. I would need to convert this to hex based movement and add in rules for wind but the basic idea is quite neat.

I'll add it to the list of potential rules and give it a try, once I've put together and painted a couple of the Peter Pig Pieces of Eight ships. This will happen at some point this year but I'm doing the AK47 army for the next six weeks or so, which means that any other things are on the ever expanding 'to do' list. When I do get round to it, I may well write my own set of rules using a card based turn sequence, hex based movement and lots of 'random events' to make it interesting.

Yo Ho Ho.