The Fletcher Pratt Naval Wargame Pt1

In this first post I want to talk a bit about why I am interested in the Fletcher Pratt wargame/rules.

First some history. As children my brother and I always played with toy soldiers and eventually I bought a copy of Don Featherstone's Naval Wargames [1] and we moved on to playing naval wargames with scratch built (very rough) sailing men-of-war. After a while I devised a method of making reasonable models of WW2 warships out of card to a scale of 175 ft to the inch (about 1:2100) and we started using these in games using the version of the Fletcher Pratt rules in Feathersone's book. The problem was that I was more interested in naval wargames than my brother so eventually I mentioned the game to some friends at school. One in particular was interested and we started a small group with one or two others playing, but now using Triang minic ships at 1:1200 scale which were soon supplemented with scratch built models to this scale (using Ainsworth's plans from Model Boats). Anyway we continued with these arrangements for a while but eventually found a bigger group to join in the small adds of some model magazine. Unfortunately the group we found was the 1200 model ship society (unfortunately because we would have been better off with the Naval Wargames Soc) and moved away from the Fletcher Pratt rules.

The reason why I am writing about these rules today is the revival of interest in them with the publication of a couple of volumes in John Curry's History of Wargames Project [2][3].

References:
1. Featherstone D. Naval War Games,  Stanley Paul, London, 1965, ISBN 0-09-076581-8

2. Curry J., The Fletcher Pratt Naval Wargame, 1933, for Fighting Naval Battles 1900-1945, as Updated by John Curry et al (2006), 2006

3. Curry J., Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame, The History of Wargaming Project, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4475-1855-6