Battle of the River Plate using Email and War at Sea

Like many wargamers COVID-19 has thrown up some interesting challenges to being able to play games. At the League meeting in March there was a slight unease in the air, and isolation and lock-downs that followed weren't that surprising given the developments of the virus globally over the last couple of week and months.

The WWII Eastern Front Play By Email (PBEM) game that Brett was running has stalled for this reason (games to be played on the tabletop), but it gave me an idea to run a game of my own. There were a fair few blog posts, forum threads and YouTube videos that gave me some ideas.

I settled on WWII naval, using a Hotz Hex felt mat that I bought years ago for running WWII aerial games at Little Wars Melbourne. Ara, Brett and Liam expressed an interested on testing whether my ideas would work.

While we had all played WWII naval games together in the past with Mongoose Games' easy to play 'Victory at Sea' (no one mention the train wreck that Warlord Games' refreshed version appears to be), I decided to use a beer and pretzels game I played around 10 years ago - Wizards of the Coast's Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures: War at Sea. It's a collectable miniatures game (CMG) that I have a lot of ships for. They're bendy plastic, but I love them as it introduced me to WWII ship classes quickly. For that I will always have a soft spot for the game and the miniatures.

Yes - the rules are relatively simple, but this means larger fleet actions could be manageable in the future (I'm a wargamer, I am already thinking of campaigns). However, this meant the players would have easy grasp of the rules quickly in isolation. The only main changes I am going to make is to the movement ability of ships, their shooting arcs and stacking limits. At Ara's suggestion we added blind movement (one thing that would be harder to do on the tabletop). The change from the offset grid to hexes made no difference to the game.

For movement a ship can't move in any direction as per the rules, but instead its facing dictates its options. Turning doesn't expend any of a ship's movement allowance.

In the example above the ship is facing towards 0707. Turning of 60 degrees left or right is allowed before moving a hex. So with a movement of 2 the ship in the example could turn to face 0706; move into 0706; turn to face 0705; move into 0705. I decided on turn then movement (as opposed to many rules that require forward "energy" to be expended before allowing turns) as the ground scale is larger for this game and add some level of unpredictability for the opponent. Destroyers would be able to turn up to 120° as they would be more nimble.

Modification to the shooting rules would have the number of dice for shooting (including torpedo attacks) directly over the bow or stern halved (rounding up). Refer to the diagram below (noting that some ships get a range of 4 for their main guns).

For stacking limitations each player would be allowed to only have one ship in each hex, but two destroyers. Movement through a hex by either side would be allowed.

Some of the players questions included whether we'd be doing group emails or just ones between each player and myself. I was planning on an email chain for the Axis and one for the Allies. [edit: this became a email to all players with current positions and I received individual responses and then I'd send out again for targets and post a link to the relevant blog post for outcomes, etc.]

While all of us have other commitments, I assured everyone that I wanted this to be fun above all else turnover time for email responses weren't expected on the same day, I was imagining 1-2 days per turn.

Players wouldn't need to track their own turns as I had converted the felt mat (6' x 4' with 4" hexes on a 12 by 18 hex grid) in Photoshop to a virtual one with hex ID numbers using a Battletech template I had found online. I would email every turn the map with every ship's current position.

Brett and Ara were happy to have me, as GM, roll their dice. As Brett put it: "Happy for you to do all my die rolls for me and applying them to the target - A Captain doesn’t get involved in the aiming and the firing of the ships guns. That is the Gunnery Officers job!"

For something easy, and a popular introduction scenario for WWII naval gaming in many games, we settled on the Battle of the River Plate, with Ara commanding the Admiral Graf Spee, Brett the Exeter, and Liam the Ajax and Achilles.

Next post, deployment.