Hey guys,
I introduced Victory at Sea to my club yesterday and it was a lot of fun.
One of our members has a horde of 1/2400 WWII ships and I hated the idea of them sitting around. ? I purchased these rules to see how things would go and it turned out to be a great success.
Of course he picked the minis for the first game...Hood vs. the Bismarck. ?
After a few hours, which involved reading the rules a lot, both the Hood and the Bismarck were being claimed by the Atlantic.
While I would never say VAS is a naval simulation, it is still an immense amount of fun where you play with cool minis, throw dice, and mock friends about their lousy critical rolls. ?
Hood and Bismarck traded some devastating blows. ?The key difference in the fight was Hood's weaker armor. ?This meant Bismarck was scoring far more criticals. ?Of course she never rolled that golden bullet that would send Hood straight to the bottom. ?
Before the end Hood lost her engines. ?Becoming a sitting allowed Bismarck to place one final salvo that finished the proud Battle cruiser. But the flagship of the Royal Navy didn't go down without a fight. ?
The whole time she traded salvo for salvo with the Bismarck. ?While not scoring has many criticals, 15" shells cannot be ignored and the accumulative damage was starting to show. When the last of Bismark's shells crashed where crashing in Hood, her own final salvo crippled the Bismarck.
This left the duty of avenging Hood in the hands of HMS Prince of Wales, commanded by me. ? Throughout the battle HMS Prince of Wales was launching her own 10 gun salvo. ?Of course 14" guns aren't as good as 15" guns, but in this case ten of them made up the difference. ?She contributed to Bismarck?s slow accumulation of damage and in the end finished Bismarck off.
To the fateful history buffs the Prinz Eugen was there. ?At one point Hood sent a salvo her way slowing down her engines. With her reduced speed she couldn?t close with the battleships to make more effective use of her 8" guns. ?So that critical took her out of the fight sense we wouldn't let her close with us.
After that we brought out some American and Japanese forces for a little night fighting by Savo Island.
We didn't finish the game but the night fighting rules made it very interesting. ?
The Americans beat up a Japanese Battle cruiser but I lost heavy cruiser from a magazine explosion. ?I guess I was due. ?
Great fun?by the way a long lance torpedo does horrible things to a destroyer.
Thanks for reading.
?But I remember playing AH's Jutland on my friend's living room floor in High School. ?