Close Action

Close Action is a naval board wargame published by Clash of Arms in 1997 and designed by Mark A. Campbell. The game replicates naval warfare of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The game was inspired by and shares superficial similarities to the Avalon Hill game Wooden Ships and Iron Men (WS&IM). It was created chiefly in response to perceived errors in the simulation found in WS&IM.

Close Action was first imagined in the 1980s by Mark Campbell and other avid Wooden Ships and Iron Men players as a "fix" to WS&IM's unrealistic simulation of Age of Reason naval combat. Campbell, while retaining many superficial similarities to Wooden Ships and Iron Men, changed the game mechanics significantly in order to create a more realistic simulation of period naval conflict. Over a decade was spent designing the game and play-testing in both small and large games, chiefly along the Eastern Coast of the United States. Close Action was finally published by Clash of Arms in 1997.

Close Action is broken up into turns, which are broken up further into phases. Phases of a turn in Close Action include:

Close Action, though it is at its basis a tabletop wargame with only a few players, is considered especially good with large fleet actions, replicated by numbers of players generally in the tens and twenties, but sometimes expanding into the forties or larger. (This is largely from the game mechanics having all players simultaneously plot their movement and fire, and having limited communication via signals, so larger numbers of players do not slow down the game waiting for each player in sequence to have a turn.) There are usually large monster games played at the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society conventions in Lancaster, PA, and at other wargaming conventions.

Many monster games are played on a massive hex-grid with 2-inch hexes rather than the standard hex-grid which comes with the game. In these monster games, famous, infamous, obscure, or even semi-fantasy battles are fought between fleets. The ideal ratio of ships to players is 1:1, though this is usually not entirely achieved. Mark Campbell himself runs many monster games, including the Trafalgar Day games, which are the largest monster-games, being upwards of 40-50 players. On the first Trafalgar Day game, held in 2005 one day after the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, there were 60+ players in attendance, and there were(in a rare occasion), even more players than ships.

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