| Title | The strictly by-the-numbers U-boat drama of The Hunters |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Game reviews |
| When | January 28, 2014 |
Although it's about German U-boats in World War II, solitaire boardgame The Hunters (not pictured) is a mostly unadorned exercise in rolling dice to see what happens. To be fair, that description applies to many boardgames..
Read the full articleBummer. But anyway, "The Hunters" isn't the only U-Boat operations narrative that cuts off at 1943, since that year is basically when the German conclusively lost the Battle of the Atlantic. It might be academically interesting, but it would be even less of a game.
As Chase says, the Battle of the Atlantic was decisively lost in May 1943, known as Black May (see Michael Gannon's excellent book by that name for more info), so playing from 1939-43 effectively constitutes simulating the Battle of the Atlantic.
"But didn’t those guys get to play until 1945?"
No, they didn't. None of those "top ten" commanders patrolled after 1943. All of them were killed or transferred to desk jobs prior to 1944. (In Luth's case, it was January 1944 but he had been back from active patrols since earlier in 1943.) If a high-scoring ace survived that long, he became too valuable a training and propaganda asset to risk on further patrols.
I agree that the game has some design problems, but I don't think ending the game in 1943 is one of them.
It's basically B-17: Queen of the Skies with a few more tactical decisions concerning range and weaponry, and the addition of the promotion and crew upgrades is welcome. For a simple, quick solitaire game with reasonable historical fidelity, it's better than average. And I do like the fact that I can request (once my captain has advanced to a certain rank) where my patrol area is. And yet, it hasn't cast its spell over me the way B-17 did (and still does).
And almost every solitaire game suffers in comparison to Butterfield's gems, but the level of decision making and risk here is still far, far below that of, say, RAF or D-Day at Omaha Beach, both of which also get tons more narrative mileage as a consequence.
To me, it's basically B-17: Queen of the Skies with a few more tactical decisions concerning range and weaponry, and the addition of the promotion and crew upgrades is welcome. For a simple, quick solitaire game with reasonable historical fidelity, it's better than average. And I do like the fact that I can request (once my captain has advanced to a certain rank) where my patrol area is. And yet, it hasn't cast its spell over me the way B-17 did (and still does).
And almost every solitaire game suffers in comparison to Butterfield's gems, but the level of decision making and risk here is still far, far below that of, say, RAF or D-Day at Omaha Beach, both of which also get tons more narrative mileage as a consequence.
Also, if you want nicer components, check out the The Hunters Download Page at Consim Press:
http://www.consimpress.com/dow...
Special attention to Delphine Echassoux's Large Custom Map Board. Wow.
Just curious: is the $90 price tag justified? I could get Caverna or A Study in Emerald for that much, and they have lots of components. Does the price reflect the depth of design or perhaps how niche this product is?
Ninety bucks? Where is it $90? I got mine for $28 via the P500 before release, and after release the price tag was $40. If you're seeing it for $90, that can only be because people are flipping their copies since it has sold out and the second printing isn't scheduled until the summer.
I haven't played "The Hunters", but this is basically how I felt about "B-17" and "Patton's Best". There are a lot of great soliatire games out there, from the '80s on. I really prefer the ones that have real decisions and/ or depth. But a lot of people seem to be enjoying "The Hunters", so to each his own.
I really am digging this influx of boardgame reviews the last few months.
I was going on the Amazon ad at the bottom of the review. That price makes makes much more sense if they're between print runs. Whatever the market will bear, I guess.
Bruce, Germany continued to throw U-boats into the water, and those U-boats continued to sink enemy ships. There were more U-boats sunk in 44 and 45 than in the previous four years of the war *combined*. Furthermore, the tonnage of Allied shipping sunk held steady during those last two years. The Battle of the Atlantic might have been lost in 1943, but it was by no means over!
The fellow I mentioned, Herbert Werner, patrolled into he was captured in July 1944. And I can assure you that most of the U-boat captains in my games of The Hunters weren't any sort of propaganda asset! It's not at all a reflection of the historical reality of the situation that the game ends in 1943. Furthermore, the designer's notes clearly state that the game stops because Gregory Smith, who made the game, feels The Hunters in its current state can't properly handle the changes in U-boat warfare. He even lists several facets of later U-boat warfare that he feels couldn't be adequately expressed in The Hunters' gameplay. Which just makes me want to see where the game would go if those facets were introduced.
Imagine a rogue-like that gets increasingly difficult as you play. Wouldn't you want to see it through to the bitter end? That was certainly the situation for most U-boat captains. You don't stop making a game because it's going to get prohibitively difficult, any more than you don't put the easier bits in the front, with all those unescorted ships gallivanting about, ripe for the plucking. I guess I can respect that the designer feels his gameplay system can't adequately capture the late war period, but I maintain it's abrupt, contrived, and doesn't at all reflect the historical reality of the Battle of the Atlantic.
"Academically interesting"? Sign me up! Seriously, though, that's plenty of incentive for me to want to see how it would have turned out.
If you want a non-flashy tabletop text-and-numbers presentation of the experiences you got with SSI's old Silent Hunter games, or from watching Das Boot, there's unique value in The Hunters. If you're a, uh -- what's the submarine equivalent of a grognard? -- you'll appreciate all the charting and the tense die rolls and the unfolding narrative. I can't say how much money it's worth for you, as that's between you and your wallet, but certain people will certainly love this game.
By that reasoning, there shouldn't be ANY wwII games taking place past 1943.
The simulation would break down, Tom. The BftA was two completely different struggles in 1939-May 1943, and May 1943 onward; the former where the U-Boats had a reasonable chance of success, and the latter where they didn't. "The Hunters" isn't the first to acknowledge this; "Steel Wolves" (the follow-up to "Silent War") is broken down into two volumes. SW Vol. 1 is 1939-1943, and I'm really interested to see if SW Vol. 2 will ever come out and how it will handle the overwhelming Allied superiority.
Simulation? Do you really think of The Hunters as "a simulation"? I think that's a bit of a stretch given the game's structure. But obviously, the fellow who made the game agrees with you and says as much. But if your point is that it got really difficult for U-boats, I don't see that as the simulation breaking down so much as a reflection of What Really Happened. "Breaking down" and "not being easy" are two very different things. :)
More to the point, the fact that things changed dramatically is exactly why I want it to continue. Things changed dramatically pretty much every year between 1939 and 1945. Isn't that one of the main reasons that World War II is such a fascinating subject for historical games?
Typos:
"evase maneuvers"
"Here’s the how that would look"
"increasingly complexity"
"which makes this it a convenient game"
More of this Tom, please!
Loving the boardgame coverage.
You just got done saying you didn't like playing the game, and now you're complaining that it ends early? "And such small portions..."
Whether or not Herr Werner patrolled until 1944, my comment was a reply to your statement that the "top ten" "got to play until 1945" but you didn't. Which I was pointing out that they didn't, either.
I'm not sure what you were getting at with the tonnages you mentioned, but relative to the increases in new shipbuilding from 1943 onward and the large commitment of existing US shipping after the Casablanca conference, this represented a fraction of the percentage of total Allied shipping compared to earlier in the war. And I'm not even sure where you're getting that the tonnage of Allied shipping sunk "held steady" in 1944-45 compared to 1943 and previously - I'm looking at Blair's numbers and it shows a pretty huge drop-off in mind-1943. But like I said, those numbers represent a dwindling proportion of total Allied shipping.
But whatever. Part of wargame design is choosing the period represented in your game. When did the Battle of the Bulge end, anyway? Should Shenandoah's game have ended on December 28? I'm pretty sure December has 31 days. I'm not sure where they get off trying to pull that one over on us. Why not continue until the Rhine crossings? Or the end of the war?
One of the considerations in choosing a beginning and endpoint is game effect. If starting or ending a game on a particular date for history's sake makes for a markedly worse game, then it's a pretty dumb designer who insists on that date instead of starting somewhere else. One of the best Battle of the Bulge games I've played in Tigers in the Mist, and it doesn't include the Allied counterattack at all. Plenty of other games do. But the designer stated up front that the game is more interesting from his perspective without it, and it's too hard to balance the portion where the Allies are on the offensive. You can certainly agree or disagree with his decision, but I disagree with the idea that this decision in an of itself makes the game bad. It all has to do with how the game plays as a result. In The Hunters, your captain would almost certainly end up dying or being captured if you forced patrolling through the end of the war. I don't think that would be as good a game. If you add the fact that the system would need to change markedly to accommodate changes in ASW warfare during that time, you'd probably get a system that was overloaded with chrome and special rules, with little gameplay benefit since failure would be a foregone conclusion. I think that game wouldn't be as good.
GMT's PQ-17 is ostensibly a game about the Arctic convoys. It ends in 1943, even though convoys arrived at the Kola Inlet through 1945. But the game would not be interesting as a game after 1943, when the German surface ships were essentially all sunk or permanently parked in some fjord, and the convoys to Russia no longer had much strategic significance. So the game ends in 1943. I don't think that's contrived at all.
And release my other comment from moderation, please! It has a link to that awesome user-made map. Don't force me to say you are bias!
