|
|
"Bomb Alley" is a game in Avalanche Press’s “Second World War at Sea” series. The game shows high production values, from the great looking box and counter art, to the quality maps and other game material included. The game box is full-sized (same box size as is used in Avalanche Press's "1898: The Spanish-American War", "SOPAC", and "Midway") and you can easily fit 2 Chessex counter trays in it - stacked - with no problems. 3 can be fit in it if you don't mind the lid not QUITE closing all the way (and, given the number of counters present, 3 trays is really the ideal)
Included in the box is:
- 4 counter sheets with !840 counters!
- Two (one 17x23, one 17x17) strategic maps for the ‘operational’ portion of the game
- One 25x25 tactical map for the ‘tactical’ portion of the game
- Rulebook (24 pages, including cover)
- ‘Game book’ (5 pages game rules, 47 pages of scenarios, 24 pages of ship data lines)
- Two ‘fleet composition’ cards to lay out fleets in operation game (one for each side)*
- Three 'airbase' cards to lay out fighter missions and status (2 for Axis, 1 for Allies)*
- Player aid card*
- Blank player log sheet (will need to be photocopied for play)
* These are all printed on a heavier grade paper - similar to construction paper.
The game has two scales – an operational element, and a tactical element. In the 'operational' scale, fleets are moved on the strategic map with their contents unknown to the enemy unless revealed by air searches, submarine attacks, or coming into contact with an enemy surface fleet. In the 'tactical' game, combat between fleets that made contact on the operational map are resolved. The 'tactical' map is also used to resolve air strikes against surface fleets.
As with the other games in the series, players record their orders for their fleets in advance, and execute them simultaneously. When two fleets meet, contact is rolled for. If contact is made, the game drops down to the ‘tactical combat’ system.
Here, each large ship (destroyers and larger in this game) has its own counter, while torpedo boat and merchant counters represent several of the ships (up to 3 or 4 per counter). Aircraft counters represent a squadron of aircraft (10-12) on their front, and half a squadron on their back.
As this is the Second World War, aircraft and air combat are obviously an important element - and ‘Bomb Alley’ takes this seriously! The 'airbase' cards work to easily assign tasks to the dozens of aircraft squadrons each side commands in a scenario. A lot of these actions are resolved by a simple die roll - for example, to see the ships making up an enemy fleet nearby, you assign aircraft to the 'surface search' mission from their airbase card. You then roll a single die on the 'surface search' table, adding or subtracting any relevant modifiers to see if the fleet was sighted or not.
The 'missions' assigned from an airbase card handled in such a method include 'Search' (described above), 'CAP' (used to defend fleet from enemy air attack), and 'ASW' (anti-submarine work - handled similar to the 'Search' system). The other two options for each squadron are 'Hangar' (where each flight is automatically placed at the end of each turn it was assigned a mission) and 'Ready' (basically lined up on the runway and waiting for mission orders - typically where 'Strike' fighters sit at the turn start until given a target).
Aircraft may also be placed on the operational map and moved without any need to plot their movements for certain missions. These missions include 'Sweeps' (a flight flying into an enemy's CAP patrol space or ASW search space to try and intercept and engage the enemy CAP or ASW patrol), 'Naval Strike' (strike against ships - flight flies to target), 'Land Strike' (strike against land target - flight flies to target), and 'Transfer' (a flight moving from one base to another). In all these cases, a specific flight counter is moving to a specific place on the map, so the counter is moved at its speed until it arrives there.
Air strike resolution in this series is also workable and makes sense. When an air strike reaches a fleet that includes a carrier, a CAP may be in the air (if one was assigned that mission for this fleet), and the CAP (Combat Air Patrol) intercepts the attackers first. The attacker divides his strike into two groups of counters (completely up to him as to how) - an ‘escort’ group, and a ‘strike’ group. The CAP must engage the ‘escort’ element first – and at least one CAP counter must be assigned to each ‘escort’ counter before a second CAP counter can be assigned to any ‘escort’ counters (although, once each 'escort' has a CAP fighter assigned to it, the CAP player may choose to use any extra to attack the 'strike' element directly at this point). Once the CAP has attacked the ‘escort’ aircraft, the ‘escort’ aircraft return the favor and allocate attacks against the CAP – same restrictions – and combat is resolved. Any CAP fighters that were not hit can then attack the ‘strike’ aircraft (and CAP fighters allocated to the 'strike' element in the first step DO get another chance to attack now - meaning escorting strike elements is VERY important!).
When a 'strike' element attacks a surface fleet, the fleet is placed on the tactical map (with no two ships in adjacent hexes), and the aircraft can be allocated to attack surface ships at will. The surface ships get an anti-aircraft phase, where each ship's anti-aircraft fire plus half the anti-aircraft fire of each ship within two hexes is added together and divided by two to determine how many AA factors can fire on an aircraft. Roll a dice for each factor, '6's hit and any aircraft 'hit' have one step unable to continue their attack (and half of those steps are 'destroyed'). Undamaged aircraft steps attack their targets.
The ship-to-ship combat in the game uses a minor variation on the ‘Great War at Sea’ rules. A few differences that pick up the feel of the period better are:
- 'Looser' formation restrictions. The GWaS series was set before radio had entered widespread usage, and so ships had to maintain rigid formations - stacked 8-to-a-hex in the game, and unable to break ships away from the group - each group of 8 stacked ships followed immediately behind another stack of 8. In the SWWaS games, there are no such restrictions - the ships pretty much move at will.
- Different map scale. Surface actions in WW2 were frequently fought at night or poor weather and were short and bloody. As such, the tactical map represents only a small area of a grid location on the operational map (vs the GWaS series, were the tactical map represented the entire grid location the fleets were in). Due to this, the tactical map is smaller (9 hexes across), and weapons range longer (primaries fire 6 hexes - nearly all the way across the map), but visibility issues frequently limit this.
Other than that, combat proceeds much as it does in the GWaS games. Ships are rated for 3 gunnery types - primary, secondary, and tertiary (in addition to anti-aircraft and torpedo stats). Primaries can penetrate any armor; secondaries cannot penetrate heavy armor, but CAN penetrate light armor; tertiaries can only damage unarmored parts of the enemy ship. Roll 1 dice for each factor, '6's hit, then roll against damage table for each hit.
The game also comes with a LUDICROUS amount of scenarios. 9 Battle scenarios (tactical map only) and 41 operational scenarios! Even playing each scenario only ONCE (and who plays wargames that way?), this game has several months worth of play in it. The scenarios are almost all historical encounters (or “almost happened” historical encounters), so the only ‘play balance’ present comes in terms of the victory conditions. Both players trying to engage the enemy fleet in a massive surface engagement will almost always have one player SERIOUSLY outnumbered or disadvantaged. But, the victory conditions rarely call for such. Missions include protecting convoys carrying aircraft to Malta, escorting troop convoys to North Africa, bombarding enemy ports, etc. A wide variety – and a lot of fun!
|
Posted Sun Apr 10,2005 12:27 am
