Cruel Seas and a Frozen City

Cruel Seas and a Frozen City

 This past Friday the club was very packed, it has been for the last few weeks (late fall, in contrast, was sparesly attended). 

The gaming kicked off early with Chris, Chuck, and Matt playing some Kill Team; Chris played his orcs, Chuck some Grey Knights, and Matt played 10,000 Suns (sons?).

Then they joined Eric for a game called Underworld, which I pretty much know NOTHING about. They seemed to have fun though. 😊 

Meanwhile, across the room, the Tokyo Express was making a run down the Slot, trying to bring supplies to Guadalcanal.  This was my third game of Cruel Seas and the first which I felt really captured the systems potential. I played with Wayne, John, Jake, and Jason, and I had a blast. 

The Japanese, played by Wayne and Jason, ran two minesweepers & 2 patrol boats escorting four small freighters.  Given the composition of the force, I think this was an early mission, perhaps in October 1942.

The Americans fielded 6 PT boats, 2 per player.  The scenario was set, appropriately, at night.  The Japanese simply had to slip through a channel between two islands. The game started off with Jake and John sending their four boats straight at the Japanese, firing off several spreads of torpedos. Meanwhile, I moved ahead of the Japanese, hoping to get them in a cross-fire of torpedos.

One freighter went down right away, as well as a minesweeper, but the Jake's PT boats were both shot up horribly as well, and went down.

I'm finding the need to think a turn or two ahead for movement an interesting challenge in this game, in my first game I caused two of my ships to collide, in this game one of my boats nearly got pinned between a minesweeper and a freighter.

The last minesweeper went down, as did one of John's PT boats. My second boat was forced to slow to stop to avoid colliding with one of the freighters, but was too close to fire torpedos effectively. Both of the remaining freighters were badly damaged by torpedo hits though and my PT boats managed to finish them off with gunfire.  

I've been wanting a good, quick playing game covering patrol craft in WWII for a long time, and so far Cruel Seas meets my expectations, though I am being tolerant of historical mistakes and typos and mistakes in the rulesystem.  

Looking forward to more scenario games, maybe MTBs escorting landing craft for a Commando raid? 

I really want to try a quartet of Schnellboote versus a Fletcher-class destroyer!

Brandon ran Allen through a demo of his Hail of Fire WWII system, Brandon's Panzergrenadiers versus Allen's Canadians.  They seemed to have fun but I never found out who won. 

Finally, after the other games ended, I, Chris, Chuck, and Matt played a Frostgrave game, the Library scenario from the main rule book. 

Chris ran his Wizard of Oz themed war band, led by the witch Elphaba.

I ran a warband led by my enchanter, Fritz Franzen, and my captain, Elrohir Amroth. My warbands are all based off of my old AD&D player characters. It's a way to reconnect with those old friends. 😉

Chuck, who hates back stories, ran his necromancer's warband.  Since the necromancer is a Nazgul figure I imagine he's one of the wizardly survivors of the frozen city. 

Matt ran his illusionit's warband, no back story but all the figures are his old D&D characters. 

Matt opened the game slaughtering my ranger with a volley of arrows... our boards are way too open. 😉

We've been playing Frostgrave for several months now, and we are finding it is losing its shine, I believe. I think the problem is that there are too few monster, too little variety in what the monsters can do, and the d20 system creates too random a set of combat results. I think we can house rule it better with scenarios. For example, maybe many more monsters in each game and fewer treasures tokens, but each token worth more treasure. 

Any way, another great night of gaming!