Steamer Wars Hexed

Back in 2014, the doyen of British naval wargamers – David Manley – published a set of wargame rules specifically for wargamers who wanted to fight the gunboat battles that took place on Lake Tanganyika during the the Great War. It was entitled STEAMER WARS: WW1 NAVAL WARGAMES ON LAKE TANGANYIKA AND BEYOND ...

... and was republished in 2020.

When David Crook (the author of THE PORTABLE IRONCLADS WARGAME book of rules) decided that he want to refight the battles between the Royal Navy and German Navy gunboats on Lake Tanganyika, he looked at David Manley's rules ... and adapted them so that they would work on a hexed tabletop. The result was STEAMER WARS: WW1 NAVAL WARGAMES ON LAKE TANGANYIKA AND BEYOND: TACTICAL RULES HEX ADAPTATION.

The book is twenty pages long and is split into six sections:

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Generic Vessel Data
• The Rules
• Specific Ship Data Tables, Lake Tanganyika Campaign
• Adaptor's Notes

The rules a easy to understand, do not require much more than a D10 die and a couple of D6 dice, some means of recording each vessel's damage, a hexed tabletop, and some suitable models. The following images show examples of some of the book's pages:

For some idea how the rules work, David Crook has published a very thrilling battle report on his blog, A WARGAMING ODYSSEY.

---

STEAMER WARS: WW1 NAVAL WARGAMES ON LAKE TANGANYIKA AND BEYOND: TACTICAL RULES HEX ADAPTATION was written by David Crook and published in 2024 by David Manley's Long Face Games. It is available to buy from Wargame Vault in PDF format for £3.50.