WWII Coastal Forces, Narrow Seas!, 1:600 scale 

Having played a few games of the new Coastal Forces rules Torpedoes and Tides, Chris asked me what rules I’d used in the past. Thomas Brandsetter’s new rules rekindled interest in the period, but Chris found them a little bit abstract. So, I staged a game for him using David Manley’s fast play rules Narrow Seas!, published seven years ago. Here’s how things panned out;

In this game, set off the North Foreland – the north-east tip of Kent, a British patrol of three boats from the 8th MGB Flotilla were lying off the coast, with auxiliary engines idling, waiting for the enemy. Then, at 02.42hrs, they heard the sound of approaching diesel engines.

When the flotilla leader Lt. Cdr. Hichens spotted four black shapes ahead he ordered his patrol to crash-start their main engines, and attack. I commanded the Royal Navy in this game, while Chris led the Kriegsmarine. All three British gunboats (MGBs 76, 77 & 78) were the small but sexy British Power Boat 71′ 9″ MGBs, armed with a 2pdr.(40mm) forward and a twin 20mm Oerlikon aft. A pair of single Lewis light machine guns were also mounted on each boat’s bridge wing. 

Chris’ E-boats – or more accurately S-boats – (S-48, S-50, S-64 and S-109) were all of the S-38 Type, armed with a 20mm forward and another aft, as well as their torpedoes, which of course were useless in this game. The only exception was S-109, which was fitted with the newly-introduced armoured bridge. The were all from the 4th S-boat flotilla, led by Lt. Cdr. von Mirbach in S-48.

 It was a dark night, a few days after the new moon, so visibility from these small boats was just 12″. the British had the drop on the Germans, though, as Hichens’ MGB-77 had been using hydrophones, and knew the enemy were in the offing. This though, was the line-up above – a brutal close-range encounter, with both flotillas heading straight towards the enemy.

The Germans were moving at half speed (4″), while after kick-starting their main engines the British MGBs also reached half speed (4″) in the first turn. That put the two sides within close-range of their opponents right from the start. The British, though, turned to port at the last moment, so all of their guns could bear.

Close range in this is 6″, and so the chances of each side scoring hits was pretty high!In Narrow Seas, movement and firing is done by drawing cards, with each side acting when their card colour turned up – first in the Boat Movement Phase, and then the Gunnery Phase.

We, though, used coloured counters instead of cards, which avoided the need to keep shuffling the tiny deck all the time, with one card/counter per boat. With firing, each ships fires its gun mountings one at a time, and if a hit is scored you then work out any damage.

The range being so short, both sides suffered a lot of damage as the two flotillas threaded through or skimmed past each other. Von Mirbach’s S-48 suffered particularly badly, and by the end of Turn 2 it was considered ‘Wrecked’, with its guns knocked out, the skipper wounded and the engines barely capable of turning the screws. Damage control parties put out a fire that broke out, which was some consolation.

The crew of S-48 wasn’t alone in its suffering. All of the German skippers apart from Lt. Wilcke in S-64 were wounded in the first three turns of the game, and even the armoured bridge of S-109 was damaged. The British suffered too, with both MGB-77 and MGB-78 losing their two gun mounts, while Lt. Duncan of MTB-78 was killed. We only played about four turns, but we discovered that firefights at point-blank range can be deadly!

 The aim of the game was to give Chris a taste of the rules. He certainly had that, and afterwards he declared that he much preferred Narrow Seas! to the slightly faster but more abstract Torpedoes and Tides. I feel both sets have their place – it all depends what you want from your evening’s gaming. Next time we’ll try these with torpedoes, which, after all, is the real litmus paper of Coastal Forces games. The main thing, of course, is that we both had great fun shooting up each other’s boats!

Tags: Narrow Seas