My wife and I picked up the then-unknown-to-us 3M game "Regatta" (1968) a few years ago at an antique shop. And after playing it, we instantly fell in love with it; movement is based on wind direction, the components are top-notch (metal boats and buoys, and great island terrain), it's a tiny easy-to-teach ruleset, and fun to play with larger groups (we bought a second copy and have had up to 10 people racing with no slow-down.)
I had some scrap wood in a waste bin, and a few extra pieces of brass rod. One bored afternoon, I used my Xacto knife and scraped out a little hull from that wood scrap. Plopped in a piece of brass rod, and immediately knew that I needed to make a bunch of these tiny little craft. The original plan was to use the boats to do some small-vessel naval actions from the War of 1812 using the Heart of Oak rules, but I also quickly realized these would be great for a larger version of Regatta (and will get the most use). So this month, I built a few more; I think seven will be plenty for now -- though, I do have a couple Black Seas brig hulls I picked up to try out some more square-rigged scratch-building, but that pair is layed up in ordinary right now. (Ha, ship-talk!)
Each of these ships has a 1" to 2" long hull to give you and idea of size. The two little fishing boats are mounted on 40mm bases.
I still need to do up a few buoys, and I have some simple foam-core sandbars in progress, but I otherwise have everything needed to play some big Regatta.
Note: Ok, so the ship bases are almost 3" long which means I need to make a larger grid, but I think I will be transferring the sailing rules to those used in Heart of Oak, which aren't all that complicated (as long as you're not using rules about dismasting, being in irons, backsailing, heaving to, etc. et al.) Not sure when we'll play, but I'm interested to see how it all goes.
Here are a few progress shots of the ships going together. The bases are 25x75mm pill bases by Proxie Models.
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| Naked wood, brass rod, paper sails and thread rigging. The little American sloop in the center was my first finished, followed by the sloop at right. Schooners and others were done this month. |
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| All the boats are finished! I painted some reefing/stitch lines on the sails -- which makes them look a little cartoonish, but these were meant to be fun; if I wanted historically accurate, I would have bought a few Langton 1200s |