Working on my prototype of Angria, a boardgame about the early 18th century Maratha navy and its attempt to take control of the west Indian sea trade from the Mughals, Portuguese and East India Company.

Anyway, ordered a copy of Captaincy from wargamevault and though I'm guessing it may have a steep learning curve I'm really looking forward to giving it a try soon.

They do so fairly simply and abstractly by allowing a ship to roll a handful of dice each turn to represent the features of the wind. There may be a general prevailing wind but each ship is in effect its own microclimate, as Carnahan described it.

They also treat the sea and wind as real forces in their own right - a more complex "terrain" than the land, for military purposes, rather than a big blue featureless plain.

These rules can model some of those tense chases from the Aubrey-Maturin series, where you want to pile on sail to gain speed but risk having a spar blown away.

So many actual naval actions and so many of O'Brian's most memorable passages focus on very asymmetrical match-ups, one ship trying to escape another, yet games tend to focus on very symmetrical battles between ships of the line and/or dueling frigates.

And this is something I've never found before in a game. Obviously plenty measure wind direction and ship characteristics but in this one you really have to think to be able to aim your guns and avoid hazards.

I know very little about sailing, as one can probably tell by the misuse of nautical terms above, but it felt like a passage from a Patrick O'Brien book (say, Desolation Island) or when he's trying to run a gauntlet into a harbor.

I needed speed to turn into the wind, but if I moved fast I would smash into the rock ahead of me. Finally I picked up a gust and briefly lost full control of my ship, but in doing so I slipped leeward away from the rock on my left and was able to cruise past it.

It was hairy. I turned into the wind to get some distance between my hull and those jagged rocks to leeward, but by doing so I turned into the wind, lost speed and handling, and started to slip to my right and get blown towards the very peril I was trying to avoid.