On Crueler Tides - Cruel Seas AAR

This past weekend I joined Bill and Sam at John's home for a game of Cruel Seas.

I haven't had much experience with Cruel Seas, apart from one test game back in the Before Time when we could gather for our monthly club meetings. I had, however, seen the rules be somewhat disparaged online. It seems like Bill and John had been tinkering away, especially with the critical hit table, after Bill's smaller boats had riddled John's destroyer in short order.

The scenario was a convoy ambush. The Japanese had two convoys moving through a series of small islands. A Kagero-class destroyer led a small group of Daihatsu-class landing craft, while a Escort Type Hei minesweeper was accompanied by a patrol of Sampan. This was an expanded version of a previous scenario that Bill, Sam, and John had played previously.

Bill and Sam were the Americans in this fight, and controlled a flotilla each of Higgins and Elco boats.

The first game was over fairly quickly. John and I, as the Japanese players, randomly rolled to see where we would start. We ended up over 70" beyond the starting Japanese deployment area, virtually on top of the pre-deployed American boats.

John's starting position almost had him touching Bill's Higgins boats, which halted and opened fire. The small boats mounted apparently massive guns, as the Kagero-class destroyer was riddled. Multiple critical hits added even more to the damage total.

Rather than play out that game, we decided to reset and instead deploy the Japanese flotilla from its starting edge.

 

Thanks to the relatively slow movement of the Japanese ships, the destroyer and the escort crawled on to the table, as did the accompanying troop transports and supply ships. 

With the high speed of the American PT boats, Bill was already able to launch his torpedoes at John's destroyer. 

John's game was going to be less about naval combat and more about how to thread needles as Bill launched wave after wave of torpedos. 

While Sam's approach was only a little more cautious, his plan was the same...

Bracket my ships with torpedos, and then open fire with the "big" guns!

What you can't see here are the looks of discomfort that were plastered on both John's face and my own. The American ships were brutal by the rules of Cruel Seas. While John and I could only throw one or two shots out a turn (the Daihatsus and Sampans were nowhere near close enough to the action to help), the small Higgins and Elcos could fire in support of one another, sending out either four or eight shots each turn! Not to mention that they could also launch torpedos freely up to four times.

Additionally, there was the size difference. Thanks to shooting modifiers, Bill and Sam often needed to roll less than or equal to a 7 on a d10. According to those same modifiers, John and I needed to roll a 3 or less.

Suffice to say that the same only lasted until turn six, when both the Japanese large ships were so damaged that another round of average shooting was going to see a definitive finish. Rather than let the game devolve into a shooting gallery (or even more so!) for Bill and Sam, the American claimed victory once again.

There was some lively debate over the rules. It definitely seemed like critical hits were too easy to generate (just rolling a 6 on a d6, and Bill's boats could easily do that), and that the rules are very much stacked against the large ships, which are slow, massive targets, and under-gunned compared to smaller vessels.

To counter that, we'll be trying the scenario again but the Japanese will have kamikaze boats accompanying them to try and counter the speed and firepower of the American boats. The slow speed of the Sampans and the essentially unarmed Daihatsu leave the larger Japanese ships completely isolated.

That Sinking Feeling - Cruel Seas AAR

The second game from the January South Jersey Gamers Association was Warlord Games' newest offering, Cruel Seas. I hadn't paid much attention to the release, for several reasons. The scale of the miniatures and actual conflict (basically patrol boat skirmishes) and the period didn't grab me. Also, since this is another of Warlord's offshoot games, they rules weren't likely to be all that good.  

Ted set up a five player game using one of the scenarios in the book. Three German E-Boats needed to rescue the crew from a stricken compatriot in the center of the table. Four British Vosper Motor Torpedo Boats would oppose the German flotilla, aiming to capture the E-Boat's crew.

The German's game plan was to fight against the odds and send two of the three E-Boats to peel off and attack the Vospers, while the third E-Boats moved to rescue the waterlogged crew.

Unfortunately, that plan didn't pan out. The smaller Vospers proved annoying difficult to hit, and when the E-Boats slowed to try and get a better shot, the Vospers lit them up. One E-Boat took a hit to one of its stowed torpedoes, which detonated and caused massive damage.

The stricken E-Boat decided to open fire as a Vosper approached (it wasn't a legal target to the British until it chose to fire), but instead sank below the choppy surface of the English Channel.

My E-Boat managed to secure the German sailors, but since I had to slow down to do so, three of the four Vospers trained their guns on me and opened up. In a single turn I went from having 55 Hull Points to 4!

In the next couple turns I managed to slip away thanks to some bad dice rolling, and moved up to full speed. The British players paled, realizing that their chance of victory was slipping away.

Sam, of course, wasn't going to have any of that, and made up for his dismal luck in the To The Strongest! game by dealing enough damage to my E-Boat to sink it.

Ted did run a fun game, and while my overall impression of Cruel Seas hasn't changed, it won't be a game that I actively choose to avoid for group events like SJGA meetups.