PLAYED FOR YOU

Alarm! U-Boot!

Battle at Sea

You deploy your fleet of six submarines, four destroyers, two mine sweepers and two battleships in any order on the first two rows in your half of the board, next to and in front of your command ship, and you take twelve torpedoes, six water bombs, four cannons and ten water mines, five of them real, five of them decoys. Then players alternate to roll the die and to use each point to either move a ship card forward by one square, turn the ship by 90 degrees or shoot once; these actions can be used in any order and combination. Without using a point you can place a mine on an empty square, a mine is dangerous for all ships! Mine sweepers can move across mines and remove them; a destroyer can move over a square with a submarine and automatically fires a water bomb and destroys the submarine. If you are first to reach the opposing command ship and destroy it with one shoot of your cannon you win.

The first reaction is, of course, "Battleship", but at second glance the game is a bit more complex and much nearer to Stratego. The various ship types and the different kinds of weapons provide many possibilities for actions. The mines, which can also endanger your own ships, if you did not remember where you placed the decoys, are an interesting detail. Unfortunately, the tactical fun is somewhat diminished by the dice rolls, because they finally determines the weapons range of your ideally positioned battle ship.

But if you like this mix of tactic and luck of the dice roll - let's say the die stands for weather conditions, which are also unpredictable at sea - you will find an attractive game providing good fun.

Players: 2

Age: 8+

Time: 30+

Designer: Balász Norbert Soós

Artist: Randall Wilson, Berryman Ivan, Co-Libri

Price: ca. 20 Euro

Publisher: Best-T.A.G. 2013

Web: www.alarm-u-boot.com

Genre: Placement, dice

Users: For families

Special: 2 players

Version: de

Rules: de en hu

In-game text: no

Comments:

Mix of familiar mechanisms

More tactical play due to open deployment

Very much governed by chance

Compares to:

Stratego, Battleship

Other editions:

In Hungarian

Chance (pink): 3

Tactic (turquoise): 2

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 0

Knowledge (yellow): 0

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 3

Dexterity (green): 0

Action (dark green): 0