In the 1990s I created two large fleets of 1/2400 men-o-war and tried playing The Byng Touch, a game by Andy Callan published in Wargames Illustrated #2 in 1987. The feature which drew me to these rules was the flag signalling system, which expected one player on each side to be the admiral giving orders through flag signals, and the other player(s) on each side to move ships and fire guns according to those orders as best they could interpret them (without talking). This C3 system was a neat idea, but the rest of the rules mechanics worked poorly for me, so I set about adapting the flag signals to other games, and then eventually wrote my own game.

Since the flag system is essentially a separate module, I've uploaded it here as such, and you can download it and adapt it to any large multi-player Age of Sail game you like. The flags are meant to be printed in color, glued to magnetic sheet, and "flown" on magnetized signal boards. Each side has its own signal book which assigns a different meaning to each flag, making it pretty much impossible to read most the other side's signals.