The Hunters - U-Boat Solitaire Game

It was a rainy and unseasonably cold Saturday morning so I decide to break out an old gem of a solitaire game "The Hunters" for a little diversion.  The Hunters is a fun little game where the player is in command of a U-boat and you see how far you can get before, well, the allies catch up to you.

I stated with a basic Type VIIB boat.  Thew mechanics of the game are relatively simply - you roll to see which theater your next mission is - my first few where the British Isles.  The sub marker is then placed on the right track and you roll for encounters which are varied and based on where you're patrolling.  Earlier in the war (I started at Sep'39) you have a greater chance to catch single, unescorted ships.  As the war progresses the allied escorts and air attacks become both more numerous and more effective.

My first victim is an unescorted small freighter of the coast of Britain.  Knowing this poor ship has no escort and it is a Daytime attack, I elect to approach on the surface so I can use the deck gun.  I elect to shoot a single torpedo and fire two rounds of my deck gun.  The torpedo hits and the deck gun proves to be overkill.

Progress is tracked by mission, with the tonnage of each ship engaged written down - circled ships have been sunk.  After my first three missions my U-boat had racked up an impressive 8 kills and 42,900 tons.  We also successfully deployed mines on the third mission.  I also almost lost the U-boat on the way back from the mission as we were attacked by allied aircraft and heavily damaged.

After repairs, we shall see what more havoc we can inflict on allied shipping.  Hopefully we roll up a Norway mission as it is rich in potential capital ship targets!

The Hunters is available from GMT games.   

Play Testing My Stalingrad Rules

 

My personal vanity project of writing a set of wargaming rules continues on.  One of the goals of using hex-based terrain is speed of play (no measuring) for large participation games.  Another side benefit, is I can test the rules using board games - as with the lovely Stalingrad board and counters from Flying Pig's Old School Tactical game series.  If you're looking for a fun and "not brain melting" complex tactical WW2 game, I highly recommend Old School Tactical.

I've been running some company level actions to test the rules and find some logic flaws.  The first game proved that KV-1's shred tiny Panzer III's if they can not be outflanked.  It also proved Germans trying to cross open ground without smoke or artillery support do not have a very good time of it.

A second test game, where that nasty old KV-1 was replaced by a T-34, proved a bit more even.  The T-34 did drive off 1 Panzer III but was worn down by successive damage results and eventually caught fire and had to be abandoned.

The infantry combat worked really well but I'm still tweaking the mechanics to make it a bit more deadly.

Close Assault in the first game proved to be a bit bloodless and that combat results process needs to be tweaked also.

One of the evolving goals for this ruleset is to allow players to stage games with miniatures on a tabletop  - lets call that "3D gaming" or using an existing hex and counter game like Old School Tactical / Squad Leader / Combat Commander to play out a "2D game". 

Why would one want to do that - to make the game more approachable to new players - there are a lot of copies of Squad Leader gathering dust on shelves around the world and to facilitate extended multiplayer campaigns.  More on that in a later post.

The working title for these rules is "Company Commander: WW2".  I suspect that will change as there is all ready a ruleset named Company Commander but it's for small scale Napoleonics.   Still I think using the same name isn't the right thing to do.  At some point I'll need to put on my "brand management" thinking cap and come up with a suitably overwrought name.   Maybe "The Brave Little Toy Soldiers".

Last Night at the Club

 

Last Monday night at the club Tom ran a 100 Years War game using 10mm miniatures from Tony and Greg's collections.

We refought the Battle of Poitiers - with Greg and I taking the French and Tony and Ed the British.  The French forces outnumbered the english by almost 2:1 but our commander was rated as "buffoon" which ummm limited out choices!

It was a great game and pretty close run affair but history repeated itself and the English won the day.  These 10mm medieval armies are superb and very tempting....