Miniature War Gaming

Cody and I got together Monday evening both of us itching to try out some of our new boats. In my case my fleet of newly assembled but very shameful silver surfer Japanese and Cody with his primer black Americans.

This was Cody’s 1st Cruel Seas game and my 3rd. We opted to put together 500 pts each and go for a meeting engagement of sorts.

My force was made up of 2 Sampans with upgrades to twin 20mms, both Regular crews. I also had two T-14 MTB, one Regular, one Veteran. Then I added in a “Val” airplane armed with a bomb cause dang it, I wanted to try out the air rules.

Cody had 3 boats, a Higgins, an Elco and a Coastal Cutter.

We dropped an island into the picture and a few things around the island to break up the board. I elected to have my plane come in on turn 3.

The fun part about the Sampans of course is they look out of place with their sails. Next they’re all of 9knots max speed. This is where a little table talk brought up that there is nothing in the rules about wind direction which would matter for these boats.

I forged ahead with my first Sampan going max speed, I figured Cody wouldn’t be in range yet so I’d try and make up distance least with the Sampans.

Cody’s 40mm guns on the other hand could reach out and touch me. Given the Sampans aren’t small so no negative, aren’t moving very fast so again no negative, turns out a base 3 to hit, add in some good die rolls, I was immediately taking damage to one of my Sampans. They have 40 hull, which isn’t much.

The cutter was Cody’s slow boat. From the first turn looks like he was going to split his force around the island so I hoped to maybe concentrate fire, if I could only get into range.

Cody jammed one of his PT boats up to full speed. It was the one with ‘less’ guns. I was to learn the hardware, there are two types of American PT boards, one decently armed and the other REALLY well armed.

I decided to concentrate my fire on the boat that was closing fastest. I activated my vet T-14 and was able to score a hit, but that single 20mm in the bow isn’t a lot of fire power.

Thankfully my vet boat was able to attract attention and importantly be missed a bit from fire which if it hit would generally get really close to sinking me. Through turn 2, I managed to plink away and put a rudder crit on Cody’s nearer PT boat.

With turn 3 my Val came on, drawing AA fire that turn. While we didn’t see it in the rules, we figured that if a gun was being used for AA, it couldn’t fire at other targets. I aimed my plane after the cutter, not knowing what a bomb might do. Thankfully the Val didn’t take any AA hits and managed to drop it’s bomb and hit the cutter with it’s Regular crew. The Bomb did 5D6 with an average roll but given the cutter hull points and no crits rolls, easy enough for it to shrug it off.

That was the one run my plane could do, not bad for 14 points. Worth the investment and given the sequence of AA fire and bomb dropping I’d give the air rules a thumbs up.

While my plane coming in was a welcome development the Japanese situation was decidedly bleak. The one PT boat I was able to damage through concentrated fire and get the rudder hit (it’s the smoking one in the picture), the rest of Cody’s boats were fine. My Sampans were both wounded. One down to 7 hull points. Both of the T-14s have but 15 hull points each (that’s what they start with) so this particular force build might be able to score one ship but otherwise it needed to run.

Without speed the Sampans wouldn’t be able to get away and likewise the T-14s can’t outrun any of the American PT boats even on a good day!

I resolved to fight on, activating both of the T-14s first to continue to fire at the wounded American PT boat. Hits would land but damage rolls were terrible.

Thankfully Cody’s dice to hit weren’t all that great so I was able to continue to have a viable force.

Around turn 5/6 tho the luck turned and my first T-14 went down and a Sampan went down. I especially lucked out that the remaining Sampan took a fuel hit but it didn’t catch fire. Another hit or two and that one would be gone. Least it was a short swim to the island.

My vet crew on the last T-14 decided to take a run for it.

But due to the activation, Cody would go first and finish off the T-14 and that would be the game, my entire force sunk.

Lessons learned. I didn’t use smoke and should have. That would have masked fire from one set of Americans allowing me to concentrate on the one boat.

Aircraft rules are straight forward, and mesh well. You get basically 1 run per plane (well 2 if you are a vet crew) and then that’s that. AA rules are likewise pretty straight forward and follow the general gist of firing.

At this scale, ships are pretty hard to hit and Veteran crewed ships have extra tricks up their sleeves to avoid a bomb.

For this game, none of the ships would have been able to be hit by torpedoes. We ruled ahead of the game that none drew a deep enough draft. maybe there might have been a case for the Cutter in which case long lances should have been fired.

While the Japanese were fairly fragile for the points, I didn’t spring for their larger Hei escort which I definitely should have done. More guns, bigger boat, more hull, and more expensive. I didn’t try out the little kamikaze boats.

Veteran crews are definitely worth it if you can afford the points. I’ve been avoiding inexperienced crews. The -2 to hit is pretty harsh, still true to historical realities, learning to fire a deck gun from the bobbing deck of a PT boat was no small feat.

I did find the spotting rules that I had complained the game didn’t have in my prior post.  They are part of the 4th scenario in the book. This begs the question if they are scenario specific or something to be used in general for the game. They aren’t in the index. Something to ask about in the facebook group.

Another fun game and once again looking forward to the next one.

Warlord released their new “skirmish” Naval game Cruel Seas this Saturday. Given locally we seem to enjoy smaller ship actions between General Quarters and Flaklighter not to mention other naval rules like Command at Sea, Seekrieg, etc, we were definitely looking forward to this one.

Across the group, US, German, British and Japanese fleets have sprung up as we all got together to assemble on Saturday.

The scale for the game is 1/300 for the smaller ships and for larger destroyers, and such 1/350, tho such ‘monsters’ are in theory supposed to be rare on the tabletop as the action is tuned for really torpedo boats. The reason for the scale selection according to the author is they want to have the ability to have crew visible, they want to be able to actually see the guns. For what they delivered yes there are crew, but MGs are not found on the models. The 20mm, 37s and so on are there and they do look nice. Kits go together fairly well tho the instructions are less than straight forward. I had to consult various sources, pictures on the box or on the net to make sure things were going in the right place. In some cases you have the possibility of switching out one particular gun for a different type or one with more barrels. The kits generally allow you to directly model that switch. On the table top at several feet away telling the difference between a twin 20 or a quad 20 is pretty hard just based on the model itself.

Test Games

For our first game, we did the starting scenario with 2 S-boats vs 4 Brit Vospers. The background is both groups were trying to get back home and ran into each other on the way back. It’s a straight up shoot out and try to get off table. More victory points for sinking something, just 1 VP for escaping.

As Germans we split our forces. The first thing to note is the wake markers. Those indicate the speed. 1 knot == 1cm on the table. No inches in this game. Initiative is via the drawing of dice from a bag. One die per boat. In a game like this, that’s 4 Brit dice vs 2 German in the bag.

You’ll also note the blue splash counter. These are pretty nice and have a numerical counter on them so you could tie back to a boat or just increment the count to have more than one splash. For larger shells if there are more than 2 splash counters, it’s a further +1 to firing.

Shooting is D10 based. Base 5, with the usual modifiers you’d expect, speed of target, speed of shooter, size of target, quality of crew and then for distance. This part felt right as for this class of boats on the sea, scoring hits was generally difficult.

Movement is 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 meaning at each of those points in your movement you can change your course up to either 30 or 45 degrees depending on the class of vessel.

No premeasuring 🙂

In this case with the ‘basic’ rules, crossing a wake was scott free, however under the advanced rules, you could take a random direction because of not hitting the wave right and being inexperienced how to deal with it.

This scenario featured all regular crews. The Vospers throughout were living up to their usual expectations of being out classed when directly compared to an S-boat. A little bit of concentrated fire with good effects on the hits and they’d go down. The S-boats have more hull and more guns so all in all I felt the historical qualities of each vessel were well represented.

One thing we did wrong in the game was we didn’t take into account they effects of a twin barrel mounts which should have upped the damage a bit. We also didn’t do shooting quite right, as you are allowed to fire a mount during your movement at any of the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 points, which the mount only shooting once per activation. We were just doing full move and then shoot.

No torpedoes were used in this match, but rightly so since this class of craft just didn’t have a deep enough draft.

This ended up being a fairly blood match as I tried to limp away and Eric through crits he’d take was having various issues. Eric did manage to sink a couple and for a historical action we were way out for blood than what a crew would normally had done.

Crits are scored when during damage resolution (which is some number of D6 rolled where the number of D6 goes up based on the weapon, so 3D6 for a 20mm) on a roll of a 6 on one of the damage dice. Then you are allowed a “crew” save that models the experience of the crew to react to a situation. Pass the save, ignore the crit, fail and you roll a D10 for things like crew hits, fuel, engine and so on.

You’ll note in this picture the unit cards which have a paper indicator that moves to track health. Likewise the card has the ability to note upgrades, as well as track crits. Nice cards and good concept. The paper indicators really need to be replaced with paper clips I think as the cards should be laminated, otherwise nicely done.

Game 2

Matt and I gathered later in the day to try out the second scenario in the book. A single S-boat was escorting a freighter into port. Two Vospers laying in wait to attack. Simply it’s a good scenario to test out torpedoes.

We pulled out my 4×6 mat and cut down the space. The freighter does not have all that great of a speed, 15 knots top so I had my work cut out for me as the Vospers were assured a torpedo run or two. I figured my S-Boat would have to concentrate fire on a single Vosper and go for sinking one in hopes of then being able to deal with the other.

I had my S-Boat steer straight for the Vospers, and use the freighter initially to coax them into firing their torpedoes on a course that would be advantageous for the S-Boat guns.

With torps in the water I steered direct into their path. Torps drop into the water at the end of activation for the boat firing them. Then when that boat activates the next turn they move 40 knots in a straight direction. You’re able to fire up to 30 degrees off the bow so you have some ability to compensate for your ability to pilot.

If during the movement of a torpedo if it comes into contact with certain classes of ships you then roll for a hit as well as roll to check to see if it’s a dud. Torps, least non long lances will go up to 120cm and take 15cm as minimum distance to arm. If they hit, even something like this poor freighter they’re probably deadly. You’re rolling a bucket of D6s for damage.

In this first volley one torp did have a chance to hit the freighter. Matt missed the to hit by 1 as I recall so, more fish in the water.

Meanwhile my S-Boat was able to get some good initial hits on one of the Vospers, but in trade I took a crew critical hit so that would take care of my shooting for the next turn at a minimum and I’d need to roll to see if they’d be able to get it together on the turn after that. At 28 knots the S-boat would quickly be out of the action.

Thankfully with some good steering and activation luck, I was able to avoid the new fish in the water, but it was very close.

Matt started to plink away at me with his guns instead. My S-boat you can see is sailing off in the distance.

Matt needed to get around for another volley of fish, while the other Vosper came in for a short range raking. Unfortunately the freighter was inexperienced crew wise so their 2 machine guns accomplished nothing. Even with a couple of hits the potential to actually knock out the damaged Vosper was there.

Meanwhile my S-boat decided given the crew injuries they were done and were not to return to the fight, leaving the freighter to it’s own.

Last round, the last two fish in the water would both miss, but the very brutal gun hits Matt was able to land at point blank range, was enough to take out the freighter before edge of the world syndrome would take over.

Definitely no surprise that the crew would strike the colors.

Thoughts on the Rules

The basic elements in Cruel Seas thus far seem generally ok. The movement, shooting, and point cost system seem ok. Turn sequence is what you’d expect. People are going to pull in minesweepers and corvettes since they are part of the fleet boxes. Likewise there are stats for destroyers, that with their larger guns if they aren’t otherwise distracted with good fire could take out torpedo boats in a volley. Historical yes.

Given the scale / size of the model the destroyers will definitely be torpedo targets as they should be. For this the scale selection complements the torpedo mechanics. Compared to others, the run / tracking of torpedoes in other scales I’ve always found to be borderline unworkable if you want a satisfying WYSIWYG. At 1/1200, it’s just too small to represent that way and best you can go for, “ship was in the area’ type of to-hit rolls. Seekrieg’s get out your compass, protractor and calculator, do some high level pretty complicated multistep math while it works for the math majors, was a bit much for the average war gamer.

The activation system is a weak point in the game in my opinion. MSU (Multiple Small Unit) takes advantage of the system, such that more expensive veteran crews facing a sea of lots of inexperienced boats seems like a problem. Likewise as a captain you don’t have any mechanism to influence your activation order. For games with lots of players say 3×3 or whatever, you’ll have people standing around as one boat is activated and the invariable conversation between players on a side as they decide which players boat should go first.

The critical hit table seems optimized for smaller boats, so for the larger ships and by this I mean the minesweepers, corvettes which are supposed to be reasonable in game, have some odd results. Take a crew hit, the critical says the ship can do no fire at all that turn. For a larger ship this makes no sense as compared to a S-boat where a bridge hit or something like that is definitely going to matter a lot more.

There are rules for air, and I’m eager to try them out. There are likewise rules for subs. I’ll not comment on either until we’ve tried them out.

I’ll note that there are no rules for spotting, tho there are rules for rough seas, star shells and search lights. In the dark looking for a target seems like an obvious scenario and something the rules needed to cover.

There are rules for spotting tiny ships however. This is the class of boats like the German Linse and the Japanese Shin’yo.

The shooting table has a -2 obscured target modifier that it doesn’t really define what that means.

Really night fighting/weather needed it’s own section to pull the topic all together. Between smoke screens, light houses, these elements are a bit spread out and it’ll take a re-read to properly figure what is there and what at first glance feels like an omission.

There are 8 scenarios provided in the book. There are no scenarios or material supplied with the national fleet boxes. This is a bit of a bummer as Japanese/American Pacific actions seem like they should seem some supporting material to get people going. Guadalcanal and akin is pretty prime gaming material. Gamers are a creative lot tho so it’s not huge concern.

I think campaign material and even some organize play guidance would be fun. In the world of gaming, 1×1 tournament gameplay is a thing and certainly Cruel Seas could cater to that if a flames of war “more missions” or Blood and Plunder missions was put together that enables that style of competitive play. The building blocks are there with point costed ships.

Overall, I like the game. I can see what gaming itch it was trying to address which is great as WWII smaller craft actions seems like a neglected era for gaming.

I like the scale Warlord choose and it complements the rules. The models could use better  instructions to help with assembling. The models are good quality being a mix of metal,  resin and plastic.  You’ll be pleased with what they look like on the tabletop.

As I mentioned there are some downsides, the activation system, organization of the rules in a few spots, lack of rules to cover certain situations are some examples. If Warlord follows the path that other games companies have and issues updates, that’ll definitely be appreciated. I would anticipate that they will.

Likewise I anticipate we’ll see further models and other things to keep the game fresh and evolving.

All in all $80 for the core getting started box which includes 6 British Vospers and 4 German E-Boats with all the things you need to run the game. A fleet box runs about $100 and smaller add ons go for $20-$30 by the looks of it.

Well worth the investment and something I look forward to playing.