A Small Ship in a Big War: Corvette Command Board Game Review
Corvette Command. Publisher: War Diary Games. Designer: Alan Eagle. Price $ 40.00
Passed inspection: Solid solitaire game that puts you on the bridge of a corvette assigned to convoy duty. Easy to learn rules. The game has a strong theme that builds an engaging narrative for the player.
Failed basic: A couple of unclear rules (which were promptly clarified when the questions were asked!)
The monotony of the afternoon watch was shattered by a loud boom that carried across the ocean and reached the lookouts on HMCS Sudbury. The source of the sound was a massive explosion that had erupted from a freighter in the convoy. The freighter was rapidly settling deeper in the water. With luck the crew would get to the lifeboats and be picked up by the rescue ship.
The lookout sang out, “Ahoy below! Periscope three points off the port bow! Range…three thousand yards!” The bridge watch trained their binoculars and there it was again – the periscope of a German U-boat! The orders came down from the bridge, “Action stations! Make revolutions for 12 knots! ASDIC, go active!
The crew raced to their battle stations, eager to avenge the lost ship and protect the rest of the convoy from the torpedoes of the steel wolf….
In 2024, War Diary Publications released Corvette Command as a boxed tabletop game. Designed by Alan Eagle, Corvette Command is a solitaire game that casts the player as the commander of a Flower class corvette, serving with either the Royal Navy, or the Royal Canadian Navy. You task is to escort Allied convoys back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean from 1940 until the Battle of the Atlantic decisively turns in favor of the Allies in 1943.
Corvette Command first appeared as a free print and play game in 2021. The new version has upgraded graphics and counters by artist Wouter Schoutteten, but at its core Corvette Command remains the same game that Alan originally envisioned. I reviewed the print and play game in War Diary Magazine No 22 and my perceptions still apply to the new edition.
At the tactical level, there’s a number of games focused on the efforts of the Kriegsmarine’s submarines be it solitaire sub games such as Gregory M. Smith’s “The Hunters” or “Atlantic Sentinels” or DVG’s “U-Boat Leader”. Compass Games’ “Steel Wolves” provides an operational level game managing the U-Boat war against the Allies.
Inspired by Nicholas Monsarrat’s classic book “The Cruel Sea”, Alan set about designing a narrative solo game that focused on the actions of a single ship engaged in escorting convoys across the Atlantic. The game places the player in command of a Flower class corvette. Relatively small and lightly armed, the corvettes were the backbone of the convoy escorts in the first half of the war. These ships were tasked with protecting the convoys from attack by U-boats.
Corvette Command creates a narrative of events in similar to the classic Avalon Hill board game “B-17 Queen of the Skies”. Your escort vessel is tied to supporting the convoy (barring some random events) and moves across the ocean with the convoy. Within each sea zone, you check for a number of events and try to repair any lingering damage to your ship. With a little luck, you’ll avoid the U-boats and make it to your destination.
The game covers events for the two-year period from May 1941 through May 1943, reflecting the critical period in the Battle for the Atlantic until the tide turns against the Axis in Spring of 1943. Corvette Command details your experience across those two years of the Battle of the Atlantic. The two-year campaign is broken down into specific convoy escort missions, each of which plays out as a single game.
It’s a fairly typical narrative model in which the player commands one corvette. Each convoy consists of moving through a number of sea zone boxes and resolving events. When a U-boat is encountered, you’ll have to resolve its potential attacks as well as your counter attacks. The level of detail in the game varies with the highest detail found in your ship and her systems, with the U-boats being represented with less detail. The convoy itself is represented as a generic ‘mob’ in which you know if it’s a fast or slow group and the number of ships present when you set sail.
The heart of the game is the encounter procedure in which you resolve a U-boat’s (or multiple boats!) attack run and work to sink or damage the submarine so that it breaks off its attack. An attack plays out quickly, without diving into the detail of plotting attack positions and a long approach run to the firing point. The process is a series of task tests in which the skill of the active system is compared to a passive (targeted) system to determine the die roll threshold. Roll less than or equal to and pass. Roll higher and you fail. It’s a nice resolution system that can handle most available situations just by determining the relevant skill being used.
Bring your convoy into port and determine if you’ve succeeded or failed. Across the course of the game, you’ll check to see if your crew’s quality improves with specific systems such as engineering, depth charges, radar and ASDIC. Periodically, you receive upgraded hardware such as better radar and weapons such as ‘hedgehog’.
Alan Eagle has constructed a solid, serviceable solitaire game reminiscent of “Target for Today” or “The Hunters”. You are progressing across the game board and checking for encounters and events that need to be resolved. The game generates a narrative of your journey and actions. The improvements to your crew and weapons, give your ship unique traits and help build a sense of character which translates into player identification and attachment. That sense of attachment influences some of your decisions as you want your ship to survive the war, while still winning the game.
A common critique of narrative games is that the player can often feel like they are ‘along for the ride’ and just rolling dice and applying results without making decisions that affect the outcome. It’s a perspective that certainly applies to Corvette Command as the player has command of the ship, but you and that ship are subject to orders, and those orders are – stay with the convoy.
You will not get an ultra-tactical experience from the Corvette Command. This is not a game in which you position your escort in relationship to the convoy and the U-boats. Rather, the game delivers an abstracted experience that pins you to the convoy and then conducts attacks against U-boats using a stylized, abstracted linear engagement model.
That abstraction of the engagement model is not a bad thing. The experience is reminiscent of the attack model in the Silent Victory/The Hunters series of games. It’s also where you a player have the most input in terms of decision-making. Your key decisions are around resource management. You can keep engaging a U-boat as long as you a.) maintain the ASDIC contact and b.) have depth charges remaining on board. Those depth charges are a finite resource, and they need to last you for the entire trip. Then again, you are not getting paid to haul depth charges back and forth across the Atlantic – you won’t get points for bringing unused depth charges into port!
The player is making decisions regarding how long to prosecute each U-Boat contact and then having to choose if we should let a damaged boat slink off so we can have depth charges for future engagements or pursue it to the bitter end. The urge to go for the kill is strong, but the limits on your depth charges serve as a check on your desire to finish the job as well as remind you that shepherding the convoy past the u-boat is your primary task.
If the ship starts to rack up damaged systems from either bad luck, bad weather or damage from fighting a U-Boat, you’ll have more decisions to make. You’ll need to triage the damage and prioritize what systems you want to attempt to fix first.
Aside from those decision points, yes, you are somewhat ‘along for the ride’. But at a high level, I feel the game captures the experience of an escort ship during the Battle of the Atlantic. The game can feel very monotonous and repetitive, right up until you encounter an ‘ace’ U-boat that is a challenge to detect and attack while it guts your convoy!
Air attack in the game is very abstract. You might argue that air attack is missing from the game, but I’d argue that the game is providing an historical experience of the Battle of the Atlantic. Yes, the FW 200 Kondor was capable of air to surface attack. But the primary function of the Kondor was reconnaissance work, as such they did not usually engage in air to surface attack in the mid-Atlantic. This was quite different than the experience of convoys on the Arctic or Gibraltar runs, which were often subject to air attack. There some element of air attack modeled through random events, but you remain focused on the corvettes primary role – anti-submarine warfare.
When Corvette Command appeared in 2021, it was a unique product. There were very few games out there that looked at the Battle of the Atlantic from the perspective of the convoy. Sure, you could play any number of games from the perspective of the submarine ranging from the old Avalon Hill ‘Submarine’, or ConSim Games/GMT Games ‘The Hunters’, but playing the role of the good shepherd was something found mostly in table top miniatures. Fast forward a few years and the menu has a number of other selections to choose from. The big two that spring to mind are Atlantic Chase from GMT and Atlantic Sentinels from Compass Games. Each of these games represents the experience of convoying ships across the Atlantic, but each game provides players very different perspectives.
Atlantic Chase is the ‘high command’ level view. The convoy is important, but you have little to no visibility of a single escort or merchant ship. That convoy is merely one aspect of the larger war at sea. Yes, you want it to come through unscathed, but the player perspective is detached from the point of view of the convoy commander, much less that of the escort screen.
In comparison, Atlantic Sentinels is a much close peer in terms of offering a similar experience to Corvette Command. Both games are at their heart narrative style games of escorting convoys across the Atlantic. In Atlantic Sentinels, you are the convoy’s escort group commander. As such, you will manage the entire escort group. The level of command differs from Corvette Command’s perspective of being a single ship. Both games have their appeal, but I find the charm of captaining your own ship in Corvette Command more evocative of Monserrat’s “The Cruel Sea” as compared to Atlantic Sentinel’s perspective which is closer to the C.S. Forester’s “The Good Shepherd”.
Corvette Command captures the tension of the Battle of the Atlantic. Each new space you enter runs the risk of U-boat attack or the possibility of a random encounter. It’s noteworthy in that it’s one of the few games to focus on the contribution of escort vessels in the War at Sea and doubly so as many of those escorts were vessels of the often-overlooked Royal Canadian Navy.
The combat model is quick and easy to resolve, but each combat carries the risk of having a wolfpack stalk your convoy. Each convoy can be an exercise in frustration as you watch your losses mount as the voyage continues. That frustration can be tempered with the satisfaction gained in driving off some of the submarines, but you’ll need to weigh your need to finish off those subs against your responsibility to the convoy and the larger war effort.
For a quick playing, narrative style game, Corvette Commander delivers what it promises. On a continuum of solitaire engagement, “Corvette Commander” aligns with the experience of narrative style games such as “Target for Today” or ‘Picket Duty”.
Related websites
Corvette Command on Boardgamegeek.com
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/343129/corvette-command
Corvette Command group on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/groups/536045640915035
Armchair General Score: 95%
Solitaire suitability (1–5 scale, with 1 being virtually unplayable as a solitaire game and 5 being completely suitable for solitaire play): 5
