Shipwreck (1999)

Vandering Publishing's Shipwreck is a very basic game of modern naval warfare. It already has one supplement released - "Freeplay '88", dealing with a NATO exercise in 1988.

The game has been compared to "Harpoon 4", perhaps unfairly, as while it covers the same topic (modern naval warfare), the aim is present a much more global scope. Command of small fleets of ships is very easy in this game, as weapon effectiveness is determined by a single value and weapon damage is a single value (heavy, medium, light, etc).

Ship damage are represented by a damage area with 4 damage levels - two 'lights', a 'heavy', and a 'critical' damage level. When a weapon damages a ship, a d10 is rolled and the weapon's size is compared against the size of the target ship on a chart to see the resulting damage level (with a chance of 'none' being one of the levels). If the given damage level is already called for, the next level up is used. The net effect is as mirrored by hypothetical naval combat - ships take very few hits to be 'mission killed'.

Detection is handled within the rules in a very basic way, although special note should be made of the submarine rules. They make use of 'range bands' around a target ship. Submarines are not placed on the 'board' unless detected, making their approach and attack on these 'range band' diagrams, essentially their exact position unknown to BOTH players - neatly avoiding the need for a third player as referee almost always required in other games of the type.

The production values of the game are fairly high - no counters or maps are included, but, given the nature of most modern naval games to use miniatures or simply graph paper, that's certainly forgivable. The game manual itself is printed on glossy paper with plenty of images throughout (several pages include color images) that really set the mood for the game.