Carrier Strike At Dawn: WW2 Naval Combat

My previous ruleset Dreadnoughts At Dawn reproduced large capital ship engagements in or around the 1st world war. It did not deal with aircraft or submarines, and focused on the larger capital ships.

Carrier Strike at Dawn has a number of different "Mission types", one of which is large surface ship combat in daylight, there are changes from WW1 but not that many.

The most important and innovative missions though involve aircraft carriers and long range carrier combat, there are a number of options here, pure carrier combat such as Midway etc, or combined operations where carriers and surface combatants are engaged in the same battle though the carriers are likely to be in a separate task force than the surface combatants.

Getting this part of the rules right has been very difficult but I believe I have got it as good as I can get it.

As per DaD I propose utilising 1:3000th or 1:2400 scale models for the ships and personally I use 1:600 scale aircraft for the air wings, whilst each model ship represents 1 ship, a model aircraft represents a flight of 4 aircraft. This still means the larger carriers will have around 20 model aircraft assigned to them and we have happily played a game to completion in a normal gaming night with 2 or even 3 carriers per side.

For such large air wings the aircraft are forced to attack in waves.

There are simple and fun mechanisms for the carriers spotting aircraft to spot and track enemy carrier fleets, rather than a clever dice mechanism each player writes down a number between 1 and 10, this is where their fleet is "hiding" and then try to guess their opponents number. Whilst not materially different than rolling a dice it adds an atmosphere of suspense and fun as players try to guess where the other players carriers are hiding.

There is also a mission based on north sea convoys that involve wolf packs of submarines hunting merchantmen and their escorts, the wolf packs may be assisted by land based aircraft and or surface raiders whilst the convoy may have an escort carrier assigned for air defense

To avoid complexity the rules for each mission type are put together and duplicated where necessary, so for example if it is a night time cruiser action mission you don't need rules for air combat, if it is a carrier V carrier action you don't need rules for surface combat as the opposing fleets never come within 100 miles of each other, etc.

Whilst all ships from destroyers to super dreadnoughts are represented the emphasis is on capital ships, escorts are covered in a simplified way.

—description from the publisher