Cruel Seas playing area / thoughts

[Andrew Beasley]

Got a ‘free’ sprue from Warlord Games today (technically my wife did as WI cannot change the subscription gift name for some reason) of two Cruel Seas Vospers.

I used to play the old Tabletop Games MTB with card ships but recently sold it as part of a clear out and it needing more space than I can clear…

Looking on the Warlord Games site the mats are shown as 6×4 but I wonder if you could play it in a 3×3 or 3×4 area at all?

I also see it’s bern passed over to Skytrex and has not changed in a few years (the errata is 10 pages) and a concern or two lingers over posts saying the author has zero plans for the game and still suffers lots of issues despite the errata.

I’m not looking for a complex / historically accurate game or massive number of ships (4-6 a side at most) but it does seem to be very quiet on the forum. Anyone here playing it care to share their thoughts?

TIA…

[Duncan Allen]

The movement for the faster boats is quite high so the smaller map might seem a bit cramped.

It is a game I enjoy playing but once you move away from the small fast boats fighting each other its flaws do tend to become more apparent

 

[Mike Headden]

Despite the flaws I like the rules. However, I opted for 1/600th scale to get a bit more space on a 6’x4′ table. 1/300th on a 3’x3′ would be uncomfortably tight I’d have thought.

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Rhubarb633]

The Cruel Seas Starter Set comes with an A0 (33.1 x 46.8 inches) size paper sea mat. Having tried it,  I’d say it’s just about the minimum playable area for a simple scenario with a couple of MTBs / S-Boats. I very quickly graduated to a proper 6ft x 4ft mat. The 1/300 scale vessels are very nice, but do need a good size playing area to get the best out of the game.

As for the rules, they give a fun, quick game. Not particularly complex. Basic rules cover about eight pages, including diagrams / tables. I think they were originally rushed out without proper proofreading, hence the errata. Nothing that actually broke the game, but an annoyance none-the-less. Not sure if Warlord ever bothered to incorporate them into later print runs of the rulebook.

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

You can halve the scale fairly easily.

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[McKinstry]

As with several Warlord games, fun rules but the models are simply too big.  The models are so large and the ranges such that scrums in the middle looking a bit silly are common. At 1/300 you can have the models very close yet still a medium ranges. Those that opted for 1/600 or 1/1200 probably get a game with a better feel unless you double/triple the ranges and use a bigger area.

In Victory at Sea a destroyer physically touching a battleship near the stern will, unless Japanese, not be at point blank measuring bridge to bridge as the rules require.

 

The tree of Life is self pruning.

[Andrew Beasley]

Thanks for the comments and thoughts – decided ‘not for me’.

The sprue is now up for ‘sale’ (well free bar from P&P) here

 

[Author]

Posts