The Hunters

Jim thought it would be interesting to try this solo game - The Hunters, as a team effort.  It is a classic solo submarine simulator. You have a ship status chart and then get sent on various missions through the course of the war, trying to sink tonnage and survive! It is based on the career of U-48, a type VIIB U-Boat.

Here is the operations map - the various boxes and arrows correspond to the mission types, but typically it will be a number of transit boxes, then some operations boxes and then transit back home again. The chances of various types of encounter depend on where you are, what mission type and when in the war. 

We started in September 1939 and were restricted to sailing from Wilhelmshaven, which meant traversing the North Sea under the watchful eye of the Royal Navy and Coastal Command. Later in the war the French ports would open up, if we lived that long.

The usual rogues gallery. An awful lot of us seemed to have suitable hats for this one! John A was assigned to role of Kapitan, I was WO1 (torpedos), Tim was WO2 (guns), Jerry the engineer and John B the ships doctor. Tim and my jobs were to engage targets as directed by the captain and keep track of ammo.

The ship (boat?) chart. As is typical for this sort of game, status tracking of ammo, ships systems etc and a handy summary movement track for each mission type. I had to manage the  boats 14 torpedoes, a mix of steam and electric. The former more accurate at range but easier to detect, the latter, hideously unreliable but harder to spot. At this stage of the war, we favoured steam torpedoes, but were forced to drag along some of the hated electric ones by High Command.

The most critical charts, gun and torpedo resolution, plus escort/air attack resolution. The enemy escorts got better and better as the war progressed and air attacks were terrifying if they caught you on the surface.

Generally if we came across unescorted ships, we'd try and take them down with the deck gun, but if they had escorts, we'd go with the torpedoes. There wasn't a huge amount of ammo for the deck gun, but it was pretty reliable, whereas the torps were just all over the place. If you wanted to sink something big though, you had to give it a full spread, and hope not too many were duds and that they hit in critical places. The dud rate was shocking at first, but declined as the war progressed, we also became better shots as our experience improved. A good thing as we came across more and more escorted ships and then convoys as time progressed, so we ended up doings lots of submerged attacks, particularly once the enemy got effective surface radar.

There were tons of other charts, like this one.

And this one, but the top three were the main ones referred to.

In the end we conducted 10 missions over two years (until June 1941) and sank 18 ships with a combined tonnage of 137,100 tons including HMS Courageous off the coast of Norway. We managed to avoid being depth charged too much, apart from one occasion which caused enough damage to keep us in dock for a couple of months, but suffered a number of air attacks, one of which caused extensive flooding and another killed poor Tim manning the deck AA gun on the last mission of the game!

Captain John ended up the Knights Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, both Tim and I were awarded the EK1, and I also received the Submarine Combat Medal for sinking Courageous with a single spread. 

That was an excellent game and worked really well as a team effort. Particularly amusing were the various sound effects as things happened (Alaaarm!, woosh, bang etc). We never did get to the bottom of why tube No. 3 kept firing dud torpedoes though, despite two refits.

Tim has the Mediterranean and Pacific versions, so we'll give them a go in due course.