Battle of Trafalgar, Exeter Legionary 2025

[carojon]

This weekend I spent a very pleasant Saturday at Exeter Legionary, with the Devon Wargames Group and friends running a Far Distant Ships game recreating the Battle of Trafalgar in 1:700 scale.



With seventy-three ships on the table this was a good test of the rules in preparation for an anniversary game this October at the NWS show at the FAA Museum in Yeovilton.



If you would like to know more then just follow the link to JJs

https://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-battle-of-trafalgar-1805-2025.html

JJ

[vtsaogames]

 

[carojon]

Hi and thank you.

Cheers
JJ

[Bloggard]

Epic 

[LazyStudent]

Looks amazing! Age of sail ships are always vastly more impressive looking than the more modern counterparts 
But interesting battle to pick. I've always felt Trafalgar is kinda one sided and self fulfilling as it's very difficult for the Allied fleet to do anything different.

[carojon]

Hi and thank you for the comments.

LS - You make an interesting point on fighting these historic encounters, especially when the outcome was so dramatically in favour of one side or the other.

I suppose the answer is what an individual enjoys about the games they stage and play and I suppose in the case of a battle like Trafalgar, the exploration of a battle that was so decisive in its outcome can be an absorbing intellectual exercise in understanding why the battle was fought the way it was, given the choices presented to the historical commanders, and then presenting the players representing those commanders an opportunity to see if they can improve on that historical performance.

Thus you move away from the zero-sum game of win-lose, beloved by points based set ups, looking for ‘balance’, something all commanders in history of opposing forces always strove to avoid, looking for as much advantage as they could get, to in my opinion a much more nuanced aspect of our hobby, namely to perhaps come away with a much better appreciation for the situational performance achieved by those we read about in history books often repeating other history books, but still presenting a victory conditions outcome based on comparing game performance to the historical one.

If Trafalgar is fought using those guiding parameters, with a rule set able to reflect the combat capabilities for the theme being played, the final outcome is likely to be the same, namely a British victory over the Combined fleet. The question such a game then poses is how does the victory compare to the historical outcome and can the Allies organise their battle more effectively than Villeneuve, that sees more of their ships escaping and perhaps causing more damage or even more losses to the British in the dogfight melee that occurred by better use of their ships. You might even throw in the potential for a change in the wind, that both commanders had to face and contend with as a possibility, that could have changed things dramatically, and with a fleet battle set of rules like FDS and the time to play, look at the end of a large battle where one side is forced to break off and organise a rally point and rearguard whilst the other looks to pursue and take more prizes, an aspect rarely seen in an AOS game.

I hope that answers your question to some extent.

Cheers
JJ

[LazyStudent]

Hi JJ,

Thank you for the excellent response. I certainly get the desire to beat the historical outcome! And for sure any Age of Sail rules by Prof. Manley (a true gentleman who I was lucky to game with in the distant past as a youth in Bristol) will be great at giving both a game and historical reality. But I just wonder how if ever it is feasible for the Allied fleet to "win". Perhaps if their "victory" conditions are written with the loss of the battle as a given outcome, so that they can concentrate on minimizing losses or beating up certain British vessels, for example. It is not so much a need for balance, but more one looking to give the Allied fleet commanders a problem to solve that isn't simply how to loose less badly.

I have more and more been drawn into the feasible What If world, ably demonstraited by the LWTV Gallipoli campaign that they recently ran. Gives a little less railroading of history, and gets the grey cells working to solve the problems of warfare 200(+) years ago