Some additional thoughts on The Malvinas are Argentine. This CaS scenario was published in the April issue (#26).
I ran this scenario several years ago at the HMGS convention held in Fife, Washington, but played with Harpoon 4 instead of Command at Sea . Mr. Paul French, who had helped me with White Ensign, gave me a copy of the scenario to look at and I loved it. I cannot remember every little event of the scenario, but as the referee of this scenario I would like to tell you something about preparations for the game.
Both sides were given a trace paper of a chart for the area so that I could overlay both plots and see who had a chance of contact. Also, all the forms were made up for all the ships and aircraft. Anyone needing a refresher on the turn sequence was given a quick rundown of the rules.
I gave the Argentines several P-2 Neptunes with preplanned search patterns. I had control of these and would give the Argentine player sighting information on a time-late basis. Having the information go back to base, route it through to the fleet command, and then to the player would take several hours. Once the Argentine player figured out the base course of the RN CV group, he launched an attack with his F4U-4 Corsairs.
Here is where the preparation, or lack thereof, came out. I have never run a dog fight, so it was very slow and cumbersome when played out. Learn those rules if you game with aircraft. I believe only one aircraft made it through to attack one of the RN CVs. I let the player with the aircraft make his attack and take back what he thought had happened as Battle Damage Assessment (BDA). Then I got to play, and re-rolled the attack, this being the actual damage to the carrier. It wasn’t much.
So much for the air game. Next came a 0300 encounter between the RN cruiser-led task force and the Argentine LST group. Suffice it to say that you need to read every rule in the book to know what will happen and what could happen. I had never seen a gun fight in a Harpoon 4 game before this. The Argentine player was setting up his destroyer escorts in a beautiful nighttime torpedo attack when I approached him and said that I had never read the rules for surface torpedo attack and would most likely take too long to digest them now. Once the CL got below his 50%range band, the Argentines were not going to win. What could have happened if I was better prepared might have been an Argentine victory.
Now that I’ve got your attention, read all the rules before refereeing . That’s my advice.
BT
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