Corvette Command Overview & First Look | Solitaire WW2 Game | Board Game | War Diary Publications

0:00 hi everybody I'm Zilla Blitz and Welcome to our first look overview of Corvette command designed by Alan eagle and published by War diary Publications this game takes you to May 1941 and puts you in charge of a Corvette class escort your mission is to escort Allied convoys across the Atlantic Ocean in a campaign that can last 2 years of World War II you'll be going up against mechanical failures and Clement weather and storms and of course your greatest Nemesis the German yots let's jump in and take a look at the components and offer some initial Impressions on this game so we've got Corvette command spread out in all its glory in front of us we've got some player AIDS a small set of counters rule book a bunch of dice three different types of cards and they're sitting on the playmat we'll take a look at each one of these components individually shortly but let's do a quick overview of gameplay first now the heart of gameplay in Corvette command is the Convoy and basically you're going to be playing the role of a single Corvette escort leading across an abstract represent of a number of ships so you'll get say the 30 40 ships in your convoy and you're going to be taking them across the Atlantic preventing them from getting blown apart by OTS and this is this Convoy in essence is a 30 to 90 minute experience so that's the gameplay experience on that Convoy and it represents anywhere I think from a week to maybe two weeks of time depending upon the route you take and how fast your convoy is and the weather and elements that can kind of play an effect on the speed of on the historical speed of that game then the the second layer

1:32 of this game has is is its campaign game where you're going to have a turnaround time of a number of days say roughly a week or a few days and then you're going to be leading another Convoy back across the Atlantic suffering attacks by OTS and you kind of lather rinse repeat starts in May of 1941 and ends at the end of May 1943 so basically 25 months of action that you'll be doing this escort and if each Convoy in turn right time looks like it's two to three maybe 4 weeks you get a rough idea on how long the whole campaign would be which is really big if you're talking maybe 40 I'm kind of guessing here maybe 40 convoys that should be leading if you play the entire 25mon campaign maybe more so that's roughly that many hours if you and you kind of abstractly kind of guess that one Convoy is going to take about an hour to play out so there's a long meaty campaign in here if you want to play through the entire thing now there's nothing preventing you from playing a year or playing one Mission or playing 10 Mission uh playing one Convoy or 10 convoys whatever you'd like to do so you've got some some different uh representations and how to play this game and then just to clarify unit scale is you're in charge of a single Corvette your convoy is represented as an entire group and you're going to get attacked individually by uots but they could come in sequence if they're part of a you a wolf pack which can be up to a maximum of three OTS in the game so you could have a number of ubot attacks in one individual sector of the map here depending upon how how luck and fate treats you let's do a quick overview now

3:04 of the mechanics first up weather is modeled both in terms of how it influences your convoy speed it can break things and also it also influences you both tactics in combat if you play the a campaign game you can always play a single Patrol but if you play the heart of the game which is really that campaign game there are technology advances so from the span of the beginning of May 1941 to May 1943 uh there's going to be a number of elements in gameplay that will change and technology technology advances so things like hedgehogs will come into play to give you better attack capacity against OTS uh Huff so hfdf the highfrequency detection finder uh element for searching for OTS will come into play asdic will also come into play so you're going to get better tools to hunt OTS as the game goes along the OTS themselves will also have I think there's one or two technology advances that they're going to get that's going to make it harder to actually kind of sync them and take them out of action you have uh crew skill enhancements we'll take a look at those as we look at uh elements of the map and the gameplay the the game mat here um they're also random events modeled so you can have there's a whole sheet of random events that can happen if you enter an area and the the fates so shine in that direction your Corvette can get damaged by not only the weather but on rare occasion a ubot might actually Target your Corvette and you could be the subject of a uboat attack you could actually get sunk on a convoy the ubot combat is modeled to a fairly interesting degree there's different ranges that the ubot will take it come on the surface or come under the water

4:35 there's variable ubot tactics VAR variable ubot skills and you're trying to take the ubot out of action as it's trying to SN your ships in the Convoy and a in a fairly uh drawn out and fairly kind of elaborate uh in a good way uh ubot attack sequence that we'll take a look at as we look at the player AIDS let's jump in and take a look at the rule book now as a way of historical context for this particular game uh this game was a play game that was published about 3 years ago and has now been uh amped up and Revision re-envisioned in this full production version from more diary Publications um the rules on the whole they are 12 pages long and I found them in in sections uh fairly clear and fairly easy to decipher um I am struggling with them in a couple of places um the one place that would have been really nice would be have to had some of these terms uh defined so it assumes kind of an understanding of anti-submarine warfare in World War II so things like uh hfdf which uh pronounced Huff High frequence high frequency direction finder is a term that that's thrown about but it isn't defined anywhere they don't really tell you what it is you can kind of figure it out but it would be nice likewise very early in the the book it's talking about asdic I think anti-submarine detection skill which would again be nice to Define hedgehogs as well I think I I'm familiar with them but if you're not familiar with world War II submarine combat that could be something a player might not know so it would be really nice to have some of those terms defined

6:05 uh before you get to them to talk a little bit about what they are to set the context for the learning um the biggest place I've struggled a little bit with these rules in though is connecting some of the rules to how they connect to the components and the systems for tracking them for example the biggest one I'm not quite sure of is the game mentions how many how much time it takes to move through a box in a particular Zone in the map like a day day and a half or 2 days but I don't see any system in the components or the player aids for tracking time so I'm I don't know if it's something I'm missing or it's something that's not in the game um in either case it would be nice to know that but it would be really nice to have a system for example for like tracking movement and time passage in a campaign that's going to last 2 years um or or do you have to do that externally on your own uh that would be nice to know likewise there are some crew skill enhancements where it says uh for each member of the crew that over the previous three missions has successfully executed a skill then you can roll for an advancement on every third uh after every third Convoy not necessarily Mission but Convoy uh and I don't see a system really for tracking that as well um likewise there are counters on the map here we can see the damage um Hull damage for the the Corvette but I don't know if I can find the counters for putting there um there are some damage counters but I think those are the ubot counters so I'm there are a few things and elements of gameplay that I'm a

7:36 little bit unsure of as to how they're represented and how they connect between the rules as they're explained here and then what actually you do to execute those rules in the game now a couple of caveats here first I've read Rule books where I felt like I have understand them absolutely perfectly clear and then I've gone off and started to play the game and I have no idea what to do and realize there's a lot of gaps in the rules um I've had other situations where I've read the rules and been a little bit confused but then everything sorts itself out once I start to play so it very these these issues could very well clean themselves up as I kind of start playing through the game the second thing I would add is that I had a question on the setup that I wasn't quite sure about and I posted a question on Board Game Geek about that and then um I believe the designer is I'm going to guess England or somewhere in Europe um had a full answer the next morning when I woke up um with some graphics and images explaining it and I understood it completely so it was great to see the designer support for the game that to me is the the biggest element because I don't mind getting stuck but if you get stuck and you can't get unstuck that's when it gets frustrating to me so really nice to see that support behind the game and he did mention in his answer that he's going to be creating some more videos once his copy of this new version shows up and there are some videos on Board Game Geek explaining how different things are done uh with the uh print andplay version so that sounds like those videos are going to be upgraded as well so looks like we're going to get um really excellent support from the designer which to me is the ultimate thing I can sort through some ambiguous areas on the rules as long as the designers they helping me get through them with answers on Board Game Geek and

9:07 or someone's there helping me get through them with the answers on Board Game Geek so um a couple issues with the rules still uh kind of I haven't rendered final judgment or evaluation on them to complexity wise I would give them a three out of 10 it's not a super hard game uh soliter of course this is a complete soliter game I haven't mentioned that I guess clearly until now complete soliter game uh you there's you're only in charge of one Corvette I don't see an option really for taking two Corvettes and playing it collaboratively like that uh it's really designed as a single player experience here's our counters we have 88 laser cut counters These are nice and sharp 5/8 of an inch counters uh printed on both sides with various functions on both sides the majority of these counters here are the uh sector counters so we can see here these are for the Canadian sector and these basically cover the boxes on the map and then when your convoy goes into these you flip it over to see what kind of encounter it is in this middle Zone these ones with the moon and the dark gray here these are the air gap where you are in that zone in the Atlantic where your air escort and air cover can't cover the Convoy so this is where the ubot feasts and basically as a convoy goes into one of the sectors you're going to flip over these markers and you're going to see what's underneath either nothing blank or ubot attack or random event and we can see these six here with OTS on them these are all on the other side of the counters here for this these air gap counters so you that's kind of that middle Zone where it's going to be fraught with Peril and you're really at the mercy of the ubot hunters here this other big chunk down here is for your

10:38 skills on your crew so as your crew enhances skill they can go up all the way up to a value of six as a maximum um and then we have things here like the Convoy counter remember the weather marker there is a series of random events that could result in some tokens you get uh some damage markers and other elements to help control gameplay but really nice set of counters I really like the visual design on this game this is such a fresh clean vision of something and I love the way they have used the blue and the red in terms of and the red for ybot signifying danger it just feels like a really sharp and Polished design so kudos to the designer on this one for really giving this a fresh artistic look let's walk through our player AIDS and what might be my favorite player Aid of all time hitting my coder kind of hobbyist behind me is this flowchart for the ubot attack sequence I mean this is EXT extremely geeky in terms of it's yes no and you Branch off and tell you but it's so helpful because it tells you exactly what the order is and what to do and where your yes and no splits are and how things go back and forth so I think I'm going to have this by my side as I play the game to really enhance and reduce confusion as to try to figure out what to do at a given point in time uh in a ubot attack so really this is really really nice this one here I laugh because I probably spent an hour as I was looking at the rules trying to figure out what the various counters are and one of the things I wrote down to be really nice well really nice if there was a section of the rules that told you what each counter was and then literally as I started to make this video I found

12:09 this piece of paper so I was like oh okay that one's on me so yeah this basically tells you what all the counters do there's still a couple of things I'm not sure of like how do you track damage on your Corvette for those Hull hits and this area damage I'm not quite sure there's a you you're trying to measure some reduction in skills on OTS too and I'm not quite sure how you track those um but we'll talk about I'm sure those will sort themselves out as they go forward next up we have some mechanical failure and ship damage tables these apparently I think will probably be used quite often so it kind of walks you through that uh and then an overall sequence of play uh as separate from the ubot attack sequence as to how to uh kind of get your game going and get underway then we have a an operations record book this is I think for a single Convoy here um you get one of these so I'm not sure if if you're supposed I I would imagine maybe you're supposed to copy this or perhaps there's some available online to print them out so you have more of these or this is almost provided as just kind of a historical counterpart um and to kind of figure out how you're supposed to use things I mean I can see you're tracking time here there isn't that system for tracking the days but you could create an entire historical record for your convoy and a lot of things I think can happen here as can be evident by these random events so there uh this is the random event table and you have a 1 D20 to basically dial these up so lots of different things with some some side elements to them that can happen to your ship icebergs um what else do we have here uh

13:39 air raid coated message splice the main back main bra so all kinds of different random events that can give each Convoy its own flare and its own touch depending upon which one of these that you trigger let's take a look at our cards again I love the design on the le- hand side I've put out four of the yubo cards this is the back so when you encounter a ubot you're going to draw one of these cards off the top of what is the largest deck there's probably I say maybe 20 or so of these and that's going to tell you the the characteristics of the ubot and the ubot attack so here is a type seven ubot for example the attack is going to be long medium then close so it's going to start I think again I'm not 100% of the way through the rules but start at long range um it's got an attack skill of four an evade skill of four and here is where I think you track the damage but I'm not quite sure yet how whereas we can see this ubot here type 7even is going to come in medium and close it's got a lesser attack skill um this one down even here uh that's just off the bottom we can't see it but has an attack skill of two so each yubo to counter encounter is going to be different you're going to get some that are quite a bit better so if we can bring one in here this one looks pretty nasty attack skill of six evade skill of six and attacking from close range he is right in the Convoy's face here so these look like a lot of attention they're going to be involved again I really like the design on these and how they're represented then there are three of these cards these are the approach into Liverpool or out of Liverpool that you're going to be drawing so you are

15:11 for example you have to go out of the western approaches this way on that Northern route if you're you draw this card and this is what you draw after you draw your convoy card here so the Convoy card is what you're going to draw as you start up your next Convoy it's going to tell you the speed of the Convoy the starting location or ending location depending upon if you're coming west to east or east to west and then uh of course the starting location is always going to be Liverpool but some of them here again these are both going to the same place this is a faster Convoy that's going to Halifax instead of to St John's so these are basically the cards that you're going to be used to set up your Patrol and these other cards are for the ubot attacks before we jump in and take a look at the map in its entirety uh just to let you know there are a bunch of dice four black dice uh one white dice all six-sided a 10-sided die and then a 20-sided die so you've got a good collection of dice here and different events and different things that happen are going to demand uh different usage of the dice the biggest of which we'll take a look at when we see really kind of one of the heart of the mechanics of the game in terms of execution which is active versus passive skills and we'll see that now as we head to the map so here is our playmat now this is 17 in x 22 in and basically the the map part of it here is the middle and as we mentioned earlier there are kind of three zones to it you've got the Canadian sector for which you're going to have air cover and you're going to be either starting or reing at St John's and Halifax then this air gap where you're at the mercy of the ubot attacks

16:42 then the Western approaches that are going to take you into Liverpool at some point and so you're basically going to be moving your convoy across this map section and running into a count encounters along the way this is the spot for the ubot deck here's how you keep track of damage on your Corvette this is is the short range medium range you're going to be putting the ubo in here I think to measure how far away it is from the Convoy got a place for events and then a bunch of little tables and trackers down below down here is where you're going to be tracking the different characteristics of your crew skill so in the basic game there are five six of these here and then there are some other ones radar skills that come on turn and Hedgehog and and huff stuff that come into play as the campaign lengthens and these Technologies uh get built into the gameplay I do want to show uh this over here which is I think a heart of how a lot of the actions in the game get executed uh we do have here depth charge patterns so you have 25 dep parts and then weather tracker and then some information basically on azc detection and OT attacks some high frequency pieces of information on the map here but let's take a look down here overall though just uh before we do that I really like this design it's so fresh it's so clean um a lot of just visual pop to this in terms of how this put this together to really give it a fresh kind of uh modern-day look and yet representative of the grittiness of Naval Combat in the the North Atlantic here but let's jump in now and take a look at this table and show show how this works so I wanted to show this

18:12 chart here because this is really I think the heart of a lot of the game execution and it's really an elegant way to capture a lot of different functions in one single chart so instead of sending you to a lot of charts and in the rules there are a number of charts so there are still charts here but this chart in itself enables the designer to capture a lot of actions with the use of only one chart and at its heart here is this active skill against this passive skill and you can see the active skill has got a rating from anywhere from 1 to 20 likewise the passive is 1 to 20 and the active skill for example might be something like looking for a sub you looking for a ubot trying to find where the ubot is and the passive skill in that case would be the uots evasion skill and the example the rule book is is say the active skill for the search element of the UB of the Convoy or the Corvette is a two and the evasion skill of the uboat is a three you're going to cross reference those and get a number here we would get nine and that means on a 20-sided die you have to roll a nine or less in order to succeed at that active skill and so this allows this chart to perform a lot of different functions in the game it seems really clever I'm excited to kind of give it a try uh so it leaves L lets you instead of having 30 tables to do something um you've got a lot less now there are specific tables and a lot of different die rolles for different elements in the game that don't use this active versus passive kind of opposed skill type of resolution but this is really kind of think a really clever mechanic to

19:43 capture a lot of different gameplay elements in one chart so there we are an overview of Corvette command designed by alen eagle and published by War diary Publications uh I'm looking forward to getting this one to the table as people know on the channel I'm very much a fan of the soliter submarine genre of games especially games that allow you to have a campaign and skill advancement it's checking a lot of boxes off for the things I like to see in a soliter game Legacy elements between missions and so forth so I'm really looking forward to giving this one a shot and I'm looking forward to being on top of the ocean instead of under the ocean where I've been usually up until now with this kind of sub genre pun intended type of game now uh there is a couple of things to mention two one is I will be creating a gameplay video for this I'm not sure if I will show an entire Mission depending on how long it goes but I want to show a chunk of gameplay to help people see figure out if this might be a game you would enjoy playing uh one thing that I do like to talk about in these games and I want to mention it now just to be clear I don't yet have a sense for player agency in the game and by player agency what I mean is how many decisions and how many meaningful decisions do you make that impact game play as a player um often these uh these types of soliter experiences can be somewhat on Rails or they can have a very high degree of player agency which means you're constantly making decisions that are meaningful in the outcome of the game I don't really have a sense yet for how this one plays whether it's on the

21:14 lighter end of that scale or on the heavier end of that scale I'll get a sense as I start to dig in and play of course and I'll comment on that in the gameplay video and I will also say that uh I'm a fan of both types I just want to know before I start to play What type of game I'm getting because I know there are players that um don't like the lighter games and don't like the heavier games and it's just it's kind of helpful to know as we dig in but I don't have a sense yet for that and so there we have it I will put a link to the gameplay video as soon as it's ready I'd be happy to entertain uh any questions in between then Corvette command from more diary Publications thanks for watching everybody