More Little boats: Poleacre and America's

A polacca through it's first stages before basing, priming, and painting.

A little houy.

I finished assembling and rigging a few more ships including a little houy, a whaling brig, a polacca, as well as a a couple brigs and a frigate from Warlords Black Seas game.

Up close, these models are obviously not detailed, but rigged and painted and put on a pretty base, I think they look rather nice on the table -- they're quaint and simple. Not as super detailed as a manufactured model such as those from the Black Seas collection, but I can pop a full ship out of a scrap of wood and into a nice set of rigging within an hour or two. If anything, they are just a joy to put together.

For these last few ships, instead of just running a few threads up and down each side of the masts a few times to represent the ratlines, I used some old scraps of fine-mesh window screen. I think it looks all right -- not super -- just all right. I think I prefer the lines of thread, but the screen material looks ok at a distance. 

Raising the gaff sail on my
brigantine whaler.

I have plenty of ships now to race or battle with, at least at the 1:600 scale level; In the mean time, I had a few of these weird oval bases from Proxie Models, and decided it would be fun to make just a few more boats, but this time something dedicated to sail racing games, and something larger. I think these translate to roughly 1:300 scale(?) I think the bases are 40x75mm, and the boats stand around 3 inches tall. No matter the scale, all the racing boats will at least be in scale with each other.

I wanted the boats small enough to be able to game on a table, but large enough to fill those bases and look striking on the table or a shelf. I chose designs representative of early America's Cup racing (1851 to 1900.) I've made a few racing cutters and a couple schooners -- I don't need a lot, I just wanted enough to play with my main group of gaming friend. 

Steam launches to watch over the races. 

As a bonus, I made a bovo fishing boat (Mediterranean vessel with lateen sails seen at the far right of the last photo) for my wife to put on a shelf in her office, but it's to scale with the others in case we want to add some color to the races.

I also departed from the sailing vessels for a few days and threw together a pair of steam launches. Their only purpose is to be committee boats and to delineate the start/finish line for our races. But they look nice, add some variety, and will be fun to paint up.

A tiny regatta

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.

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.

    Beginning to add paint. The two small boats are a small lugger and a Sicilian "bovo" boat.

     I also added a Xebec to the mix for fun and color.

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