Scratch One Flat-top!

 Mark was hoping to run Worthington games solo effort 'Scratch One Flat top", a game covering Pacific carrier battles, at this years Virtual Conference of Wargamers (VCOW) back in February. Obviously it is a single player game but we've played loads of these as teams and he wanted to try it out beforehand. The Tuesday/Wednesday regulars all pitched up and we gave it a shot.

The playing area and ship reference cards. This is very similar to the Hunt the Bismarck game with large sea areas subdivided into four, ships have flotation points and the option to burn fuel for extra speed. The main difference with the Bismarck game is that the US player commands two carrier Task Forces, Lexington and Yorktown, each with fighter and bomber groups and an assumed surface escort.

Fairly obviously this the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese are trying to invade Port Moresby with their invasion fleet following the track of white dots from Rabaul down to Moresby and the US have to stop them. Somewhere out there are Japanese carriers, whose actions are run by the game system as it is a solo game.

Normally we'd do this sort of thing on Powerpoint, but Mark had run out of time so for Tuesday we prototyped it with a jpg image of the board and updated it using MS Paint.

The CRT. Carrier groups can allocate fighters to CAP and to bomber escort. Bombers just attack things, there are separate CRTs for both and give an idea of the optimum force levels to allocate. The P results are planes lost, and S results are hits on ships. The ship cards show how many fighters and bombers each carrier has remaining. Like the Bismarck game, combat is very abstracted and the fixed rather than proportional nature of the CRT means you are much better off doing big strikes than little ones.

A downside of using MS Paint as a collaboration tool is that it ends up tiny on the shared screen in Zoom. I projected a copy of the map onto my big second screen to keep track of things. We were all US players, I was allocated the role of Admiral and each TF had a Captain and an air group commander.

We set off westwards with the two TFs in adjacent large squares. each carrier can search one adjacent large square, rather oddly this has to be orthogonal.

You can see the TF tracks on the image above after a few turns. Lexington is blue and Yorktown is gold. The Japanese fleet is tracking along its course marked by red blobs, and the big red blob next to Yorktown is a Japanese carrier group! Shokaku and a light carrier (Shohu?).

A carrier battle duly followed which was quite good fun, but annoyingly Lexington couldn't join in as although it was adjacent, it wasn't orthogonally adjacent. That seemed a bit silly to me. Anyway, we came out top, Shokaku was badly damaged and Shohu went down although poor old Yorktown took quite a hammering. Lexington manouvered to try and catch Shokaku, but it slipped away westwards.

We decided to call it a night at that point to have a washup session. In the AAR it turned out that another Japanese fleet carrier had sailed right past us! We had a good discussion about how to better run the game as a remote team game, and the following evening planned to try it with Discord and parallel presentations using Powerpoint and ConceptBoard to handle the unit display. Sadly I wasn't able to make it but I gather it went well.

tbh although I like the concept of the game, I wont be rushing out to buy it as it just seems too abstract to be a decent simulation of carrier warfare (and this from someone who likes Dominion of...) but it is a good way to pass an evening. I like team based decision games, but I could do with slightly fewer unruly Captains!