EasyShips

Copyright 2003 by Mike Fischer
Last modified: 02/15/2006

  I.   Introduction                 a. Air Strikes
  II.  The Ships                    b. Gunnery
  III. Setting Up a Battle          c. Torpedoes
  IV.  Playing the Game             d. Depth Charges
  V.   Movement                     e. Ship Damage Markers
    a. Basic Movement Rules         f. Sinking a Ship
    b. Collisions                VII. Damage Phase
    c. Smoke Screens                a. Fires
    d. Evasive Action               b. Flooding
    e. Submarine Movement           c. Repairs
    f. Submarines and Sonar      IX.  Winning the Game
  VI. Combat                     X.   House Rules
                                 XI.  How I Got the Numbers
                                 XII. Designer's Notes

I. Introduction

EasyShips assumes you have some of my All the Ships counters, or a set of naval miniatures. You'll also need hex maps of open sea, like the letter-sized map that comes with the game. These rules are meant for simplicity and fast play, not for extreme realism; the emphasis is on surface combat. The intended era is the first half of the 20th century. All you provide is some 6-sided dice, a 20-sided die, and pens and paper for some simple record-keeping if you use carriers or submarines.

II. The Ships

Each ship can have up to four gun ratings, a torpedo attack, and an air attack. The other ship attributes are armor, defense strength, and moves.

Gun ratings are expressed as "#x#", where the first number is the quantity of guns, and the second number is the gun size. Quantity of guns determines the likelihood of scoring a hit. Gun size determines the guns' range and damage. The biggest guns on the ship are called its primaries. The second-biggest, if any, are called secondaries. Some ships have tertiary guns, and a few have quarternaries (the fourth-biggest).

Torpedoes have short range and do great damage.

Air strikes have a range of 100 (essentially unlimited in this game). They can concentrate on one enemy ship or divide their strength among several targets.

Armor is the heavy steel plating that protects the important parts of the ship. The higher the armor, the bigger the gun necessary to pierce that armor and do damage.

Defense strength is the ship's resistance to being sunk. This depends on the size of the ship -- it takes more damage to sink a 30,000-ton battleship than a 1000-ton destroyer.

Moves is how many hexes a ship can move in one turn.

III. Setting Up a Battle

To create a fleet, you have three choices.

1. You can recreate a historic battle, using the ships that actually appeared in that battle.
2. You can use one of the pre-defined fleets in the document that accompanies these rules.
3. You can play one of the scenarios that come with the game.
4. You can buy ships for your fleet using a point system.

Historic battles can be interesting to re-enact -- can you fight Jutland to a conclusion, or do better than Halsey did at Leyte Gulf? The trouble with such battles is that they are rarely fair. One side or the other usually has a significant advantage in numbers. You'll need some books on naval history to know which ships you should use for a particular battle.

The pre-defined fleets are balanced pretty closely, so they will make for a fairly even game. Of course, they are not historically accurate.

As of this writing, I haven't written out any scenarios. But rest assured, I will.

To buy ships with a point system, each ship gets a point cost which is a function of its armor, defense, moves, main-gun size and quantity (or number of torpedoes if a submarine), and air-attack strength. Under this system, small destroyers will go for ten points or less, while a good-sized cruiser can set you back 30 points or more, and monster battleships like the Japanese Yamato go for over 100 points.

Decide on a total number of buy-points for each player; I recommend multiples of 100 or 250. Choose the year your battle will take place. This determines which ships you can buy, based on the two-digit year on each ship counter. In other words, if you're fighting a battle in 1935, then 1935 is the cut-off year for ships you can use. Spend your points on the ships you want. Unused points are lost.

Regardless of how you choose your ships, set them up on the map. You will normally want them in line-ahead formation (a single line). If you're playing a historical battle, then history will tell you which way the lines are facing. If not, then each player rolls a d6. The low roller sets up his ships first, at one edge of the map. Then the winner sets up on another edge, with all ships out of gunnery range of the enemy and vice-versa, facing in the direction he thinks best.

IV. Playing the Game

1. Initiative Phase: players roll a d6. The winner is called Player 1 for the current turn.
2. Player-1 Movement Phase: Player 1 moves all his ships. Smoke screens happen at this time, and sonar pinging happens at the end of this phase.
3. Player-2 Movement Phase: Player 2 moves all his ships. Smoke screens happen at this time, and sonar pinging happens at the end of this phase.
4. Combat Phase: resolve all air strikes, gunnery, torpedo attacks and depth-charge attacks. Player 1 goes first in each category. Apply all damage at the end of the entire combat phase.
5. Damage Phase: damaged ships try to repair themselves. Smoke screens may dissipate.
6. Victory Phase: determine if a player has won the battle.

V. Movement

V-a. Basic Movement Rules

1. For ships with double-length or triple-length counters, the ship's location is the hex in which its bow is located. Such ships must always be lined up in a row of hexes, facing one of the six directions; they cannot sit at an angle.
2. A ship can move some, all, or none of its move units each turn. It takes one move unit to move one hex.
3. You can move your ships in any order. Each ship must finish its move before another ship can move.
4. Destroyers can turn three hex-faces per turn. Escorts, submarines, carriers, and most cruisers can turn two. Battleships (including pre-dreadnoughts) and battle-cruisers can turn only one hex-face per turn. A ship cannot turn more hex-faces per turn than its current maximum speed, regardless of type. Ships can turn at any point in their movement except at the very end.
5. Ships with double-length counters turn by moving the stern into the hex where the bow was. Triple-length ships turn by moving the midsection into the hex where the bow was, and swinging the stern out to the side to keep the counter in a line of hexes.

V-b. Collisions

V-c. Smoke Screens

Any ship can make heavy black smoke from its funnels. This hides the ship, filling all the hexes where the ship is, and moves with the ship. Destroyers and escorts can make chemical smoke as well; this fills each hex the ship leaves, and stays where it is until it dissipates. The owner of a ship making a smoke screen must announce this at the start of each move where it makes smoke. Use "Smoke" markers for both types of smoke screen. A ship can make or trail smoke for a maximum of five hexes, and must wait five turns after ending a smoke screen before it can make smoke again.

No ship can shoot guns or torpedoes through smoke. Air strikes are unaffected.

During the Damage phase, roll a d6 for each Smoke marker laid by a destroyer. If the roll comes up 1-2, remove the smoke marker.

V-d. Evasive Action

Air strikes and gunnery attacks must add 2 to their to-hit rolls when attacking an evading ship. Torpedoes aimed at an evading ship must subtract 1 from their to-hit rolls, and a second torpedo hit is impossible. An evading ship loses one move unit for that turn, and must add 1 to its own gunnery rolls. Remove the "Evasive" marker at the end of the turn, assuming the ship doesn't take evasive action again.

V-e. Submarine Movement

It takes all of a sub's move units to change from any depth to the next deeper or shallower depth, to dive or surface, or to move one hex underwater. So a sub can do only one of the above per turn.

As soon as a sub dives, remove its counter from the map, and keep a written log of the sub's location and depth. Replace the counter in the appropriate hex when the sub surfaces.

V-f. Submarines and Sonar

A destroyer or escort vessel can "ping" at the end of its move. This searches the hex immediately in front of the sonar-using ship if it moved 2 hexes, or the three front hexes if it moved 1. If the sonar-using ship did not move, it can search the front three hexes, plus the three hexes in front of those. At speeds faster than 2, sonar does not work.

To "ping" a sub, the destroyer's owner announces that the destroyer is using sonar, indicating the hexes he's searching. The sub's owner secretly rolls a d6, subtracting 1 if the sub is at Shallow depth or 2 if Deep. If the result is 1 or higher, the "ping" successfully reveals whether there is a sub in one of the searched hexes, and the sub's owner must tell the other player which hex, or that he found nothing. If the unmodified roll is a 5-6, the sub owner must also reveal the sub's depth. If the result is less than 1, the "ping" is inconclusive; tell the sonar-user that he found nothing. One "ping" can reveal more than one sub if they are in the destroyer's sonar range; if this is the case, roll for each sub separately. If there is no sub in the pinged hexes, roll the die anyway so the enemy won't know he's off target, and tell him he found nothing.

VI. Combat

VI-a. Air Strikes

A fleet with air-strike ability will also have fighters to defend itself. Defending fighter strength is the same as air-strike strength.

Carriers that are more than 10 hexes apart cannot combine their air strengths, for attack or defense. In such a case, each carrier or cluster of carriers launches its own separate strike, and defends itself with its own fighters.

Because airplanes move so much faster than ships, an air strike is considered an instantaneous event, just like gunnery. The planes of an air strike are not represented by counters on the map.

Resolve air strikes as follows:

1. The attacker writes down which ships he is attacking, and the size of each attack group.
2. If the enemy fleet has any air strength, the air strike must make its way through the defending fighters. For each 4 defending fighters, roll a d6. The attacker loses one plane on a roll of 1-2, two planes on a roll of 3-4, or three on a roll of 5-6. If the air strike is made of more than one attack group, assign a number to each group and roll a d6 for each group of fighters to see which group they attacked. Each group of fighters shoots down attackers in the same attack group. If the air strike outnumbers the defenders by 2-1 or more, the attacker loses 0-2 planes per four defenders instead of 1-3. If the defender has leftover fighters after forming groups of 4, roll a d6; even numbers mean they shot down one attacker.
3. Now identify which ships are the targets of each attack group. Don't bother mentioning any ships whose attacking planes have all been shot down.
4. Next, resolve anti-aircraft fire (AA). Any ship within 4 hexes of the target ship(s) can try to shoot down some attackers. Each ship making an AA attack must specify which target ship it is trying to protect, so the attacker knows which attack group will suffer losses. To fire AA, divide each ship's Defense by 8, dropping fractions, but not less than 1. Pre-dreadnaughts and armored cruisers always get a result of 1. The result is the number of d6'es you roll for that ship. Each die that comes up 6 means one attacking plane was shot down. If the year is 1943 or later, or if the ship is an anti-aircraft ship (like the USS Atlanta, HMS Dido, or IJN Teruzuki), a roll of 5-6 shoots down a plane.
5. Now, from the attacking planes that remain, half of these (round up) will make dive-bombing attacks. Each bomb acts like an 8" gun at point-blank range. Thus, if four dive-bombers attack, treat it as a ship with four 8" guns firing at a range of 1. If your game is set in 1941 or later, bombs count as 11" shells instead of 8".
6. The remaining attackers are torpedo bombers. Treat these like a torpedo attack at a range of 1.
7. Keep track of the lost aircraft. If you have more than one carrier, divide the losses among them equally. Lost aircraft will also reduce the carrier's defensive fighter strength.

VI-b. Gunnery

• Each ship can fire its main guns at one enemy ship per turn. If it has secondaries, they can fire at the same ship or at a different ship; ditto for tertiaries, and a ship with quarternary guns could conceivably fire on four different targets in one combat phase.
• The range from attacker to target is the distance in hexes from the attacker's bow to the target's bow.
• A gun's range in hexes is equal to its size plus one.
• A ship cannot fire through another ship's hex to hit a more distant ship. If the line of fire (from the center of the firing ship's bow hex) passes through 50% or more of another ship's hex, that shot is not allowed.
• The number of guns that can aim at a target depends on how the attacking ship is facing. There are six main directions a target can be found: ahead, starboard-bow, port-bow, starboard-quarter, port-quarter, and aft. If the bow of the target ship is in the arc from bow to quarter, all the attacker's guns can aim at it. If outside those arcs, only half the guns (round up) can aim at it.
• Guns 6" and smaller fire twice per turn. Guns 3" and smaller fire three times.
• If a ship fires 20 or more guns of the same size, you must divide the shots into groups. Choose the least number of groups possible, as long as the number of shots in each group is less than 20. Resolve each group as a separate attack.
• For each ship or group of shots, roll a d20, with the following modifiers (use all that apply):
  1. +1 if the range is greater than or equal to the gun size.
  2. +2 if the ship has just begun firing or if its guns have just shifted targets from another ship.
  3. -1 if the range is less than or equal to half the gun size (round down).
  4. -1 if the range is less than 4.
  5. -1 if the range is 1.
  A result less than or equal to the number of guns is a hit. An unmodified roll of 1 is always a hit, and if you get such a roll, you can try again for a second hit. If that roll is a 1, you can try for a third hit, and so on (to a maximum of half the shots fired).
• If the attack is a dive-bombing attack, and no hits were scored, but the d20 roll was just one too high for a hit, a bomb scored a near-miss. This causes 1 unit of flooding on the target ship.
• For each hit, each player rolls a d6. The attacker adds his gun size, and the defender adds his ship's armor. If the attacker's gun size is at least 7", and the range is more than half the gun size, the attacker adds 2 for the effects of shells plunging down on the enemy deck. If the defender's result is higher, the armor stopped the shell and the hit did no damage. If the results are equal and the target has less than 3 fires burning already, the shell hit the target's superstructure and started one fire.
• For each hit that pierced the armor, take the result from the previous step (attacker's modified roll minus defender's modified roll), and consult the Critical Hit Table to see what the hit did to the target ship.
• Damage is not applied until the end of the combat phase. That is, if a hit takes away some of a ship's guns, those guns can still fire in the current turn.

VI-c. Torpedoes

A torpedo has a range of 6. Roll a d6 for each torpedo. Rolls of 1-2 are hits at ranges of 1-2 if the attacker is a submerged submarine; otherwise, you must roll a 1 to hit.

A torpedo hit always causes one level of flooding when it hits, and usually causes a critical hit. For each hit, roll two d6, subtract 2, and consult the Critical Hit Table. The flooding from the hit doesn't count as flooding from the Critical Hit Table.

If a submerged submarine launches torpedoes, whether they hit or not, the torpedoes' wakes will give away the sub's position. Pick one of the hexes adjacent to the attacking sub (or its actual position) and tell the enemy that's where the torpedoes came from.

VI-d. Depth Charges

Only destroyers and escort vessels can drop depth charges. To do so, the attacker must pass through the submarine's suspected location during the movement phase, or end its turn there. More than one destroyer can pass through such a hex in a turn, so multiple destroyers can attack a submarine at once.

During the combat phase, each destroyer must announce the depth setting for its depth charges -- Periscope, Shallow, or Deep. The sub's owner rolls one d6 if his sub is at Periscope depth, 2d6 for Shallow, or 3d6 for Deep. If the attacker's depth setting doesn't match the sub's depth, it's an automatic miss, regardless of the rolls. If all rolls come up 1, the depth charge scored a direct hit and the sub is destroyed. If the rolls are all 2's, or a mix of 1's and 2's, the depth charge was a near-miss and the sub must surface immediately, reducing its depth by one per turn, not moving out of the hex it was in when it was damaged. A damaged sub that is surfacing cannot fire torpedoes as it reaches Periscope depth. It can fight normally once it reaches the surface, but cannot submerge again. Make sure the attacker doesn't see how many dice you rolled, or how the numbers came up, or you'll give away your sub's actual depth.

VI-e. Ship Damage Markers

If you prefer, you can write each of your ships' names on a piece of paper, and stack the damage markers on or next to the name. The other player can ask if a given ship is on fire, and you must answer truthfully, but you can keep other kinds of damage from him.

VI-f. Sinking a Ship

1. It suffers a magazine explosion.
2. It has too many fires burning on board.
3. It suffers too much flooding.
4. Its crew abandons ship during the Damage phase. The ship sinks automatically.

VIII. Damage Phase

VIII-a. Fires

Ships that carry aircraft must subtract 1 from their damage-control die rolls when fighting fires. A ship with a fire burning can launch no air strikes. At the end of each turn, reduce the aircraft on that ship by one for each fire still burning. These aircraft can be transferred to another friendly aircraft carrier instead of being lost, if the other carrier is not afire and has lost some planes so it has room to take on the planes from the burning carrier.

VIII-b. Flooding

Every turn, at the same time you are resolving fires, you must deal with flooding. Flooding poses no risk to a ship's guns; it can cripple your speed, however. See the Fires & Flooding Table for damage effects. Apply damage from flooding (such as loss of speed) only the first time that level of flooding occurs.

VIII-c. Repairs

For each ten points of defense, or any fraction thereof, a ship gets one d6 roll for repairs. If a ship gets more than one roll, you can choose to take each roll separately, or take a pair of rolls together and choose the higher value. For example, a ship with a Defense of 25 would get three rolls, so it could roll three times, or roll twice and take the higher roll, then roll once and take that value as-is. You must make this decision before rolling. Choose which area you want to repair, roll, and consult the Damage-Control Table to see if you were successful.

If a ship with fires doesn't try to fight them, or if a ship with flooding doesn't try to fix it, that ship must roll for those categories anyway, and ignore any result that makes fire or flooding go away.

A ship that has too many fires or too much flooding will sink at the end of the Damage phase.

IX. Winning the Game

X. House Rules

1. Japanese torpedoes in WWII were bigger than anyone else's. Japanese ships in this era could get +2 on torpedo range.
2. The rule for half the guns firing forward and aft can be altered if you know the firing arcs of your ships' guns. For example, the French Richelieu-class battleships carried all their big guns up front. Such a ship could fire a full broadside at a frontal opponent, and get no primary-gun attack on a rear opponent. This rule would also affect how many guns would be knocked out by a hit -- the Richelieu would lose four guns from a primary-gun hit, not the default of two.
3. You could consider the effects of weather. Some ships could not fire their smaller guns in stormy conditions because the guns were too close to the waterline. Carriers have to face into the wind to launch and recover aircraft. Low visibility can make long-range gunfire impossible.
4. Some large ships, like the American Iowa-class battleships, were unusually maneuverable, and could turn as many hex-faces per turn as a destroyer.
5. Night battles present their own complications. A ship out of visual range (say, 5 miles) cannot be attacked, so all battles would be close-range slugging matches. You might require a ship's secondary guns to fire star shells instead of armor-piercing shells if the target is out of searchlight range (which would be about 2 miles).
6. Some ships in WWII were equipped with gunnery radar. Such ships' guns could ignore smoke, bad weather, and reduced visibility at night.

XI. How I got the numbers

• Gun quantities are the maximum number of guns of that size, whether they could all fire on the broadside or not. The gun size is the actual size in inches, rounded off.
• Torpedo attacks are the maximum number of torpedo tubes that could fire in a single direction.
• Air-attack strength is the number of planes carried, divided by two.
• Armor is the average of the ship's belt and deck armor.
• Defense strength is the ship's tonnage divided by 1000 (not less than 1).
• Moves is the ship's maximum speed plus 1, divided by 5, and then reduced by 2 (not less than 1).
• Point value uses the following formula:

  a = (armor + defense + moves) x 2
  b = (pri_gun_size x pri_gun_qty) / 3
  points = (a + b + air_attack) / 2

  Round upwards to the nearest point. For submarines, use the number of torpedoes for pri_gun_qty and 12 for pri_gun_size.

XII. Designer's Notes

The emphasis on fires and flooding, as opposed to the generic "damage boxes" used by many games, is because most battle-damaged ships were more threatened by fire and water than by the damage directly caused by shell explosions. Most other types of damage aren't considered in the name of simplicity. The chances of scoring a hit are small because that's how most naval gunnery worked out. It also adds to the excitement of the game -- when hits are uncommon, every one could be a major event.

I'm thankful to Marc Shefelton for his many comments as he playtested the game, and especially for pointing out that the submarine rules from my StarMarines universe were much better than the sub rules I'd initially written for this game.

Revision History