VAS – Home Brew Ship Cards for Victory at Sea.

I have been playing Victory at Sea for a long time, not long after the original Mongoose Publishing rules were released years ago. I like the rules, as they are very simple to play. This makes them great for quick games that any novice can play in an evening. So, when I want to run a night game at my FLGS, VAS is my go to set. With that said, I will not say the rules are perfect and give the greatest simulation of naval battle. However, they allow you to have fun, get the feel of the genre and finish! That is good enough for me.

When the original rules came out, I already had a large supply of GHQ WWII ship minis. A lot painted and a lot more that need painting…. The original rules were a little short on ships, so there were some limitations. Eventually, Mongoose released a supplement for flushing out the other ships and navies. At that time, there were no ship aids, so you either had to Xerox the sheets or write them down by hand. I got tired of that and made my own using MS Excel. These worked great and got a lot of use.

Well, Warlord later took over the system and then re-released the rules. This new version is really just the release of the version two rules that had been play tested through the Mongoose user boards. I did a few playlists back then and really liked all the changes (I posted a review of the rules when they were released). Clearly, I was very happy when the new rules came out. However, Covid came and my gaming mostly dried up for a couple of years and that included VAS gaming.

Well, things finally opened up this year and my weekday gaming has returned and VAS was on the list for WWII gaming nights. The only problem was I still had the old ship cards… I was hoping Warlord would release their own for sale. They did, but only with their own ship models. Well, I already had plenty of ships (and I think GHQ still has the nicest models on the market), so I was not going to buy all new models. That left me with the need to update my old ship cards.

This proved to be harder than I planned. The changes to the rules and ship statistics made a conversion a bit of work. I had to remove a number of stats that no longer mattered (e.g. Crew size) and add more detail to the weapons (e.g. fire range bands are now weapon based). This was made a little more difficult, as I had since moved to Apple and removing fields was more difficult.

Well, I agreed to ru the game a few weeks ago, so I needed to get off my duff and update the cards. So, I sat down and worked on all may cards. I did not want to start over, so I figured a way to convert my old cards (I had done cards for all my ship models, painted and unpainted).

I started with modifying each card to fit the new rules. I then aligned them to fit on a standard sheet (I still do not know how to force a page break in Numbers). I printed them o light card stock on my home laser printer (I gave up on inkjets years ago, due to the cost of maintaining ink). I had picked up a laminator a long time ago, so dusted it off and sealed each sheet (this allows the use of dry erase markers on the cards). Next, I cut the cards out on my cutting board (this is a must for any gamer). With that, I have my ship cards and am set for future gaming. In retrospect, I probably should have gone with a standard size card, not fit for each ship. This would make storage easier, but then again, smaller is better on the tabletop.

• Manteuffel