Nimitz

Over the past couple of years you may have picked up that I've been playing the occasional WWII naval game, but haven't really mentioned what the rules were. Well, I can now reveal that we were playing - or playtesting - Nimitz, the new set of rules from the prolific Sam Mustafa.

On Thursday we had our first 'proper' game, using our shiny new playtester copies of the game. I can't remember which action we were playing - it was based on something historical where the Japanese were trying to supply troops on shore using destroyers, and the Americans were trying to stop them.

Here's the setup. The Japanese have three cruisers in the centre and three destroyers to the right. The destroyers have to get to the top-left of the picture. On the left are the Americans - four cruisers and six destroyers

I was running the Japanese cruisers and it was obvious from the start that we had a tough job on our hands. The action was a night, which kind of helped us, but once teh Americans closed such that they could shoot at us despite the darkness, we had to fire back, lighting up our ships to counter fire.

We destroyed one American cruiser with torpedoes, but lost one of ours to a pile of gunnery. This broke up my cruiser formation as well.

The American destroyers swarmed us.

Over several turns our cruisers were battered, and, unfortunately, our destroyers were sunk one after the other.

So no win for the Japanese, but to be honest I didn't expect one.

Nimitz is fast, fun and simple. Not a set of rules for rivet-counters, certainly, which is probably why I kind of like them. They only deal with gunnery actions. If you want planes and carrier actions then you play the campaign rules which (in fact) make up the vast majority of the book. And which I haven't read yet.