Nimitz

We had a game of Nimitz on Thursday evening. Darren was expecting a horde of players (six of us, anyway), so just threw together a pile of Italian and British ships to use. We had loads of ships on a small table, but Nimitz copes with that OK.

The Italian fleet - there was everything on show from destroyers up to battleships. Red markers show groups moving at fast speed.

Most people had played before, but the level of experience varied. I'd made an effort to read the rules that afternoon - I had had a doctor's appointment and brushed up on them in the waiting room. This meant I was fairly up on the firing process, which kept things moving smoothly on our side.

This was our first success of the evening - a shell from one of our battleships sunk a British cruiser in an explosive critical.

Lots of action here; the destroyers of both sides were passing through each other on their way to deliver torpedoes onto the enemy big ships

Lots of torpedo action; the British (whits dice) actually decided to try and sink the Italian destroyers with torpedoes, but with everything moving at high speed the odds of even hitting were pretty slim. The British wasted their torpedoes with little to show for it. The Italians had a pop at a British cruiser, but otherwise held their fire; there were juicy British battleships to go after.

The two battleship lines converge; Italians are on the left and British on the right. Between them is a line of Italian destroyers. The battleship gunnery duel cam out mostly in the British fleet's favour, but the destroyers scored some hits on the British battleships, damaging at least one of them.

The one big British success of the night; an Italian light cruiser was hit by a torpedo and went straight to the bottom thanks to an excellent damage roll.

After a couple of hours some people had to leave and the rest of us felt that we'd had an exciting enough time to call it an evening. Whilst technically a draw the Italians were currently winning in terms of enemy vessels sunk, and were probably in the better position. The only cloud on the horizon was if the British could get a second lot of excellent firing against the Italian battleships, but there was still a reasonable chance of the Italians doing a pile of hits back on them.

Nimitz has a lot of abstractions, and we did find that it's easy to get confused with the difference between big guns and small guns as opposed to primary armament and secondary armament. But we rattled through a game with a lot of ships at a speed we were happy with.

Thanks to Darren for setting everything up and Daniel for putting up with my pronunciation of Italian ship names.