Greek Fire and Roman Fury

From the Introduction

"One of the regular debates that my wargaming colleagues and I seem to have is that of the role assumed by players during a wargame, and hence the level of detail that should be represented. Are we playing ships captains or fleet admirals? In general naval wargamers tend to assume the role of admirals whilst demanding a level of detail more appropriate to a 'game of captains.' For most periods this isn't too much of a problem as the numbers of ships tends to be relatively small, and there are fleet level rules with appropriate levels of abstraction for most periods. However, ancient naval warfare seems to be one period where all available rules operate at the ship level. Obviously this makes battles such as Salamis, with hundreds of ships involved, difficult to handle. I wanted a set of rules that could be used to recreate these enormous battles whilst placing the placing the players truly in the roles of admirals and squadron commanders. At this level the fate of the individual ships, other than those on which the commanders themselves are embarked, is unimportant. Hence, "Greek Fire and Roman Fury" was born.

"The basis for these rules is a theory that the naval battles of antiquity were fought in a style that was essentially similar to typical land actions. Therefore, in these rules, the respective fleets are represented by squadrons rather than individual ships, which are maneuvered around the 'battlefield' in a similar manner to armies. After a few false starts I decided to use the ever popular and quite robust American Civil War Fire and Fury as the basis for the system, hence the name I finally selected for this article."

User Summary

This miniatures rules set comes with information on what sorts of figures to use, and explains fleet composition, ship data (for the various sorts of ships that appear in the game), formations, sequence of play, morale, and a small number of charts

Rules set appears in Wargames Illustrated #187 (April 2003)