WorLard - Durham part one - Coastal Patrol

Yesterday I attended "Wor Lard", an annual gaming event arranged by the chaps at Durham Wargaming club where the day is dedicated to the games of the Two Fat Lardies, and indeed attended by Rich Clarke, the face of TFL, and others.

It happens in the Vane Tempest Community Hall in Durham, itself an interesting building as it once was the headquarters of the Durham Militia, but has since been converted into a community centre, which, as they say, is nice.

The Dread Portal!

The format of the day is simple. Everyone is asked in advance what they want to play from a broad menu of current and past TFL hits, you turn up, have a chat, and then get your gaming head on. One game in the morning, break for lunch and snacks, another in the afternoon, wrapping up at around 5:30 in time for a pint at the local hostelry followed by a curry. In many ways an unreconstructed perfect day for me.

My first game was Coastal Patrol - MBTs and Eboats in the Channel and all that, very much a "happening" period due to the popularity of Warlord's Cruel Seas. The scenario was pretty standard fare, E Boats returning from a patrol run into a pair of Fairmiles who are covering an Air Sea Rescue Launch inserting an SOE agent, all complicated by a patrolling R boat with a previous history of trigger happiness so everyone is under strict instructions to identify targets before shooting.

CP uses an action system - each turn a ship dices for how many actions it has, usually between none (Captain asleep at the wheel or otherwise distracted) to three. These are the usual things like change speed, order a turn, attempt to spot, shoot, etc etc.

The game was a blast, and ended with a fairly comprehensive win for the Kriegsmarine when they managed by sheer fluke to blow up the ASR launch within an inch of making it's escape. German gunnery dice were damned impressive throughout, and two critical hits on the bridges of the Dogboats caused them both to be ineffective at the crucial moment as the crew struggled to replace the COs, cut down in a hail of 20mm cannon fire.

Blinds in play

E Boat evading

Contact ! 

An E boat "blind" skilfully weaves between the Fairmiles

So the inevitable comparison with Cruel Seas (CS)? - disclaimer - after just one game of Coastal Patrol! (CP)

Lardies are usually held up as a paragon of "play the period, not the rules" and tend to produce much more "realistic" (tm) rules to Warlord, and Warlord\ Cruel Seas has taken some criticism for this, particularly over their torpedo rules, so I was interested to see how they dealt with the challenges inherent in fast attack games.

Firstly, night. CP immediately assumes the game is set at night, which is the norm for the actual engagements. CS is pretty silent on this, but there is some hand waving going on about the short in game ranges representing the problems of poor visibility and mostly being at night. CP uses a system of blinds to represent this and adds an interesting layer of confusion - "is that a target?" "is it a friend from another flotilla?" etc. This is fun, BUT there is an unavoidable layer of complication in any double blind system tracking who can see what and has identified what. That does make for in interesting game, but also imposes a practical size limit on the number of boats a side as more than 4 or 5 would probably swamp the system. One interesting CP rule is that firing your automatic weapons loses your target in the glare of the muzzle flash, so you have to reacquire taking actions - a nice touch that adds quite a bit of tension. Searchlights - searchlights in CS work in ways that defy logic and physics, it really is just a head shaking moment. CP uses a template that works, if you are stupid enough to use it because although you can see your target, everyone can see you. Nuff said.

The actual firing systems are poles apart. CS uses a number of dice based on each of the weapons firing, CP aggregates firing points devolved by the guns that can bear, meaning an average E Boat was throwing 4 or 5 dice. CS uses a simple hit points system, with possible critical hits, CP a progressive damage system where you basically shoot things off the target until it burns down, blows up or sinks due to flooding. Both systems work, but CS does make your boats extremely short lived where in CP in theory you can take a lot of hits on non essential bits. Dealers choice.

Turning. Another area CS takes some flak for is the way boats turn. There is no real excuse for this - a tanker at 15 knots should not be able to turn twice as far as a E boat at the same speed. CP uses a simple turning circle which takes a lot of hassle out of the game. I hate turning circles personally, but they do work.

Torpedoes. CS takes a LOT of criticism over it's torpedo system, which many feel is too complicated and not realistic, requiring the torpedo to move through the water, dice to hit, dice to explode. CP uses almost the EXACT same system, with one major exception being torpedo hits are pretty much universally fatal, something CS gets very wrong. The similarities between the two systems are striking, which does make me wonder how much the criticism of CS is due to an anti Warlord bias from the naval wargames intelligentsia in their stuffed armchairs (me included)?

Aircraft. CP doesnt have them. This is perfectly sensible. Why would you have aircraft intervening in a night engagement between coastal forces? CS goes all "Hollywood" here, which is fine if you like that sort of thing, or would be if the air attack rules had been better written, which sadly they are not.

On the subject of size, CP and CS both focus on small boats - up to Corvettes and Minelayers, but unlike CS it looks as though the player base has enough understanding not to want to include the Bismark.

Both games have a fair amount of clutter - both use ship cards to track damage for instance, but CP is noticeably "chart heavy", much more so than CS, which is certainly a factor in CS's favour.

So overall? The thing about Cruel Seas is, it is undeniably fun. No matter how much I dislike elements of it, and there is a lot to make you scratch your head in puzzlement, I've not had a game which was not fun. There's a lot to be said for that, even if you have to switch your brain off in places. Coastal Patrol is also fun, but takes a slightly more refined and thoughtful approach.

So either or? - Why not both? I have every intent of giving Coastal Patrol a try using my Cruel Seas models. I assume CP was written with the traditional 1:600 models in mind (which we used today) but there is no reason why it wont work with Cruel Seas 1:300 models, and vice versa.

Coastal Patrol was published in 2011 as part of the TFL 2011 Summer Special, available on line as a pdf for the princely sum of £6.49 from the two Fat Lardies web store. Well worth a look as it contains a veritable boat load of other good stuff https://toofatlardies.co.uk/product/2011-summer-special/.

So that got me through the morning. Next post will hopefully cover the afternoon where I struggle to save Roman Civilisation from the waves of unwashed barbarians.......

Muddy River Brown Water Blues Part err, well technically part 2 but there is no part 1.....

You may recall Dear Reader that there was much planning of a Stalingrad campaign for Chain of Command. We had penciled in a start date for April \ May but that slipped to June. Then our lead Russian Andy was advised by work that they needed him to work night shifts to deal with some production issues for a month or so - so Stalingrad has been postponed a little.

To fill the gap I was looking at some rules I picked up on Wargames Vault by the redoubtable Dave Manley - doyen of Naval Wargamers the world over. These were called "Dahlgred & Columbiad" (D&C) and were designed as small scale fast play American Civil War (ACW) naval rules. In addition to the rules I bought the accompanying "By Sea & By River" set which included a fairly comprehensive set of stats for both fleets of the ACW and also a small mini campaign designed to be played solo. As between me and my usual opponent Paul we have a fair selection of boats I thought "Why not?" I'm not a great believer in solo gaming so I decided to rope another person (Dave) into making the command decisions. It will pass the time for both of us.

I'll go into a bit of details on D&C later, but suffice to say the campaign revolves around a small flotilla of Union ships lead by an Ironclad feeling their way up an un-mapped tributary of the Mississippi looking for a Confederate Ironclad Ram rumor has it is being built upstream. Each campaign turn represents a couple of hours and five miles of river. the course of the river and any opposition are randomly generated by the campaign system itself, so no two games will be the same. To cut a long story short I received orders from Dave then played out the first day of the campaign, which saw his flotilla push past some shore batteries and sink two small Confederate Gunboats. It return his lead ship, the Cairo Class River Ironclad Carondelet suffered some light damage. I didnt take any pics as I never really intended to do anything with it. Dave tied up along the bank over night then ordered his ships upriver at dawn.....

Anyway this afternoon I had a cancellation at work. As the weather was beautiful I thought it a shame to waste it cooped up in the office sorting out paperwork so retired to the rear yard and run the next encounter. It turns out that the river in question looks remarkably like the table in my sun drenched back yard - who would have thought it?

The lead ship of the Union flotilla is the Carondelet. The flotilla is under orders not to waste time or risking damage by engaging in a long drawn out fight with any Confederate batteries but to push past them and locate the Ram

Batteries rather like this one "Battery Davison" which they encountered just before noon

Carondelet made all steam ahead and pushed on, followed by the "tinclad" Fort Hindman. The Fort Hindman had shown itself to be rather better at gunnery than the flagship the day before.

 The bottle tops are being used to determine initiative btw - a gold one is the Confederates, a black one Union. You are supposed to use cards but this was all pretty much spare of the moment and I could not be ar$ed to go looking for playing cards when randomly drawing from a stack of beer bottle tops was a viable alternative.

Carondelet opened up the battle - and as per the day before missed. The rules use a system of opposed & modified dice to represent gunnery. In the pics red is the firer. If the modified result is equal the target is harassed and suffers a shooting minus for that turn, if the firer is higher light damage is caused, twice as much heavy etc. As you can see, Carondelet cant hit a bulls arse with a banjo.

But Fort Hindman it seems can, causing some light damage to the battery.

Carondelet keeps up their abysmal shooting - in fact this is such a bad result it triggered a roll on the special effects table, resulting in a small self inflicted fire. Luckily it caused only local inconvenience.

Return fire from Battery Davison was inconclusive, the combination of damage to the battery and long range prevented them from getting any solid hits, and the Yankees steamed past at best speed.

There was a bit of an intake in breath as the battery switched fire to the vulnerable supply ships at the rear of the Union formation, but again the combination of range and not great shooting meant they escaped with only near misses.

The last transport moves out of range.

A victory of sorts to the Union as they have moved closer to their ultimate goal without taking further damage. They have however left another battery mostly intact in their wake that will continue to threaten any ships that pass.

Final shot of the cast and crew. Not sure when the USN went "dry" but in deference I had a non alcoholic beer. That was really the only blot on an otherwise excellent afternoon :-)

Captain Lakey and his flotilla are now heading further upstream. More action later....