Having trouble viewing the flipbook magazine? View and download it instead! It's a bit of a cliché that Medieval naval battles were just like land battles at sea, but what if you take a successful set of medieval land battle rules and set them afloat? Much to my surprise, my Never Mind the Billhooks rules took to the new environment like (yes, you guessed it) a duck to water, and, apart from needing some essential changes to the movement and morale sections, pretty much all the key game mechanisms of Billhooks seem to work just as well on the sea as they do on land. Boathooks, like its land-based predecessor, is a light-hearted card and dice-driven game, where clever tactics count for little against the twists and turns of fortune. It is very much a game rather than a simulation, so the emphasis is on the spectacle of the thing rather than the minutiae of trying to recreate historical events of which, in truth, we know very little. Andy Callan Author
