Goblintooth Enterprises

Thunderball

Reviewed by Bill Rutherford

Thunderball! is a set of miniatures rules governing skirmish underwater combat. The rule book is 58 pages long, is spiral bound, has card covers, and comes with a separate photocopiable control sheet that includes troop logs and quick-reference charts. A turn represents a minute, a miniature represents a single person or creature, and the ground scale is 1/72, that is 1" = 6' in both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

Goblintooth makes a full range of miniatures in support of this game, too. 4 pages are devoted to cleaning and painting figures, preparing scenery, and assembling the flight, er, swim stands on which the figures are mounted. As you may have guessed, the game's played in three dimensions and involves the use of variable-height stands like those recommended for Goblintooth's WW I air rules, HOSTILE AIRCRAFT. There are 12 pages of basic rules, another 12 of advanced rules, 13 pages of advanced monster, er, sea creature descriptions, 5 pages of army lists, 3 pages of scenarios, and 3 pages of designer's notes. The rules are logically laid out and are quite readable. Atmospheric (?) illustrations abound.

Basic game play is reasonably straightforward. A player typically controls several figures with a common mission. Each figure has a variable number of action points that can be spent over the course of two action bounds during a turn. Action bounds may or may not occur at the same time as their opponents' action bounds, so the result is a nice mix of sequential and simultaneous movement that I'm surprised hasn't been tried elsewhere before! Action points are spent to move (including changing depth), attack, either with ranged weapons or in melee, or to perform any of a number of tasks… Increasing the number of action points spent in a combat will increase the attacker's effectiveness in that attack.

Attackers inflict wounds by rolling a die to exceed a target number, after applying various situational modifiers to the die roll, the number of wounds inflicted being dependent on the relative success of the attack. Accumulating wounds reduces the number of action points a figure can have and eventually may kill the figure. Oh - there's an entire section on shark attacks for "Jaws" fans. The advanced rules elaborate on the preceding, incorporating weird equipment, differing troop quality, and vehicles such as sea sleds. It's worth noting that while the additional rules may complicate things by giving the players more to keep track of, they do not make the game more complex; it retains its playability.

Creatures include, of course, sharks (9 types!), reptiles (both crocodiles and sea snakes), rays, mollusks (several types), jellyfish (oog), various fish, whales, and dolphins. The army lists are for some generically fictitious (I hope!) national and private groups fielding underwater forces, and include troop and equipment specifications, so you don't have to develop ALL of your scenarios from scratch.

The three scenarios provide encounters between these forces and each include a short narrative, orders of battle, and a brief mission statement that includes victory conditions. They're interesting in that they give an idea of how the designers think the game should be played, both in terms of scenario complexity and game size. The designers' notes give more insight into what drove them to create such a game in the first place. Try it! It's a quick, fun game that provides a change of pace from the normal run of wargames. Available from your FLGS for $18.00, or failing that, directly from Goblintooth Enterprises, at 35 Baincroft road, Malden, MA 02148.

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