COW 2023 Saturday Morning all at sea

Up bright and early and eager for the fray. Or something like that. A hunt round the venue revealed that the tea and coffee stations weren't turned on just yet, but then I remembered that there was a kettle in the room. By the time I'd worked that out, breakfast was available anyway. Breakfast was up to the expected standard, and once again I made a mental note to take my own brown sauce with me. I shall forget again, no doubt.

My first session was Mark Flanagan's "Don't tell the Tsar". Set in northern waters in 1914, this covered the activities of a rogue group of Russian officers who wanted to deliver a pre-emptive strike on the Swedish navy before it could join the German war effort. The challenge was to avoid not only the German ships in the region whilst trying to find the Swedes, but also avoid the other Russian fleet until we could get the Swedes to fire on us so we could justify attacking them. Keeping up with all of this?

Mark was using "Nimitz", about which I have written favourably on this blog before, combined with ship stats from "The Great War at Sea" boardgame. Unlike the Nimitz game I played in SHQ, Mark ran the campaign rules to see if we could find the Swedes, avoid the Germans etc etc...

Blues are the rogue Russians, White loyal Russians and Reds are Germans and Swedes. I think.

Mark ran the campaign bit on a gridded map using poker chips. The rules have a search mechanism when chips are in the same square, which adjusts how easy to find the enemy depending upon how hard you are looking for them.

Eventually we made contact, and Mark explained what would happen next.

Mark explains stuff

We ran into the German ships first, and inflicted a lot of damage, sinking one with torpedoes. The Swedes opened fire, so we had a combined fleet.

The fleets approach each other

The Swedes are on the right, in a single line, more or less. We're on the right. We have three lines of capital ships, and a destroyer torpedo strike force.

The torpedoes strike

After some desultory firing we were able to take advantage of a Swedish error, and run our line of destroyers in and unleash a barrage of torpedoes. The broken coffee stirrers mark where there used to be ships. That was then it, and the end of the session.

I can't really comment on the Nimitz campaign system, based on this session. It got us to a confrontation in time to get the ships out. Mark had to tweak the combat as Nimitz is for WW2 era ships, not the dreadnought and pre-dreadnoughts we were using. The combat system worked well, but it is the case that the only way to make this type of game work is with good playing aids and data recording systems. Nimitz is simpler than other steamship game systems, but you still need to record the damage inflicted.

After grabbing a cup of tea, I was off to my second naval session of the day. This was an age of sail game, using another system I've written about before, SPI's "Fighting Sail", run by Ian Drury.

Ian explains stuff

The USP of this game was not playing it with model ships instead of counters, but that Ian has worked out the algorithm in the original game so he can take historic ship data and turn it into new ships to use with the game. 

For this session Ian put on a hypothetical historical scenario of a Franco/Spanish flotilla being intercepted by a British squadron. It is both hypothetical and historical as the forces did meet, but the Franco/Spanish fleet fled rather than fight. For this game we were going to fight.

Signal Close Action!

I won't do a blow by blow account. The British had the upper hand by the end. Having the wind gauge is a big deal in these rules, and they made it count. Ian certainly made the case that this is a forgotten classic, and that if SPI hadn't gone to pieces no doubt other scenario sets would have been published.

And it was also handy to play the game with someone who didn't learn it with me. I need to go back and re-read the rules.

Then it was lunch time, and I scurried off to set up my afternoon session.