Blue Submarine No6

[racm32]

So watching the old mini series Blue Submarine Number 6 and was thinking how it could make a cool tabletop game. For those who are not familiar you can watch it for free on HULU http://www.hulu.com/blue-submarine-no-6
Set in the near future where most of the polar caps have been malted by a scientist and these humanoid, mostly aquatic based, creatures are fighting humans for control of the planet.
Most of the battles take place in half flooded cities. The creatures use small crab like, single piloted, subs. Large living whale like subs, and at least one huge living battleship/sub. Humans use everything from advanced 1 and 2 seater mini subs, advanced spaceship looking subs and even older nuclear subs. Only small surface ships are depicted in the show but the use of aircraft is frequent.

Game could be played using a wings of war style base system where ships could be raised and lowered to show how deep they where and if they where on the suffice. Terrain could be half sunken skyscrapers or any underwater setting.

Thoughts?
Does this already exist in some fashion?

[soulman]

Hi there....

I do love my space battles, but I also have love for submarine combat. I have now and then looked at designing  some rules for near future sub combat. Blue sub was cool in the moments it did battle. Also there are a few battles in season 2 of seaquest.... a early season one maybe of a AI killer sub on the loose and in season two there was more sub battles.

Have you seen the end battle on GI joe too ? Very nice....

SO...

In my own mind, i cleared up the scale of one man sub fighters and bigger slower subs by have say 3 different sea depths. One man sub fighters would be shallow, and sub cruisers like in blue sub etc would be deep. That leaves modern type boomers hugging the sea floor.

Because a boomer has no chance against a one man sub fighter in shallow waters etc etc.

My own pickle is sorting out the moment of subs...? I don`t want written down hidden moment, and subs will need to make a sonar roll to detect a sub before firing, based on the speed of each sub at the time ( i had in mind two speeds.... slow and fast ).

I like a game where subs take a chance at the right moments to "go fast" to get into postion and then dift in slience  waiting to fire torps. As it takes only one or two hits to sink a sub, I wonder if this is the problem of a submarine game ?

In a space battle a ship could have 30-100 hit points, each turn knocking points off until bang.. but a submarine game its about getting into a firing postion without being heard to get the first shot off.

But The tension of trying to evade 3-4 torps when one hit could kill now thats drama for you... not saying to yourself in a space battle game, that i can take a extra 20 odd hits before I need to pull back.

I wonder what space battle games do with "cloaking" ?

Startrek attack wing, or mongoose starfleet rules....?  what do there use for hunting down ships.

Love to hear your own thoughts....
Alan Uk

[Doomsdave]

For gaming surface you might try to make som thing like the classic(and highly sought after, expensive) board game "Sub Search".   

Pictures on this page:

http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2012/06/collectible-of-week-sub-search-milton.html

The tiered boards with the "surface" as the top should be easy to do.

[Gunbird]

That game is a collectible? I've got a complete one, picked up for 1 euro at a swapmeet a few years back. Jeez. 

[racm32]

You could use a similar system I have seen in Two Fat Lardies through the mud and the blood WWI game where you have several markers that are numbered on the underside and only pre planed ones are the real units. This could be done in game with markers that represent faint sound or heat signatures that "could be" the enemy. You move them around until one of your's positively ID's the enemy and then the fakes are removed. They could also be removed it the model fires or goes fast ec..

[maxxon]

I always thought Blue Sub was cool concept but the production seemed somewhat rushed. It should have been a full series. Or a more compact tale.

Now the first thing is that the combat in Blue Sub isn't really realistic at all. Heck, they have an underwater battleship!

You have to decide whether you want to do that, or real sub combat.

For real subs, look at GDW's old 2300 Star Cruiser. It's very much built on sub combat principles and detection is key.
It's still available at Wargame Vault -- unfortunately the download is missing the combat charts so the game can't be played as-is, but you can get the basic idea.

[soulman]

Hi Guys... Great for the input...always nice to get the cobwebs out of the brain attic.

The one idea I did think of about undetected moment of subs was the following ( ideas are rough )

Each sub starts off board and replaced with a marker ( black pingpong ball Etc )
Each contact moves on table the  same speeds as the sub its copying.
Turning is now 360

When a sub is detected its replace with its model, moment is returned to normal.

As for the Detection placement ?

I was thinking when a sub/Marker does detect another marker its replaced with the sub in question, based on the roll the detected sub is diced for the direction on travel. If the enemy submarine that detected went "Active" then both markers are replaced with submarines and rolls are made for direction of both subs.

Best roll would be a "Chase", one sub behind the other.... worst would be a head to head. and both could shoot....!!!  Nasty

At some point a detected sub can return to Marker mode, if some conditions are met, like a thermal layer, or at the end of a turn when you have not taken a hit or near miss. As you know opening fire places you on the board, so its about placement rolls...

Anyway.. thats that for the moment... over to you please on my thoughts....

Alan

[The_Beast]

I know there was a subwar adaption of Full Thrust on a Belgium site; haven't looked at it in years.

A similar game, with David Manley's rules for elevation for depth, might be Aeronef.

In both cases, the water is transparent, i.e., perfect knowledge.

I would tend to suggest something like that for what I call the 'Battle Pass[tm]', and a metagame with a large map for search-and-detection.

Your 'black ping pong ball' does sound a bit like Full Thrust's 'bogey' rule. One could use it as part of the transition between metagame and combat.

Edit: Not able to get to Schild en Vriend site, but here's the Aquazone page from the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040217175807/http://www.nirya.be/snv/AQUAZONE/aquap.html

Doug

[racm32]

Well if you wanted to go along the lines of Blue no6 one side would use subs and the other would use biological creatures (mostly).
Spartan Games Firestorm Armada has some ships that would make good futuristic subs. I dont know where or what you would use for Bio subs or ships or even just regular future surface ships. I notice that battle fleet Gothic Tyrnids would work well but only seen them for sale on ebay and cost a fortune.