Raiders of the Deep Overview & First Look | Compass Games | Solitaire Board Game

hi everybody I'm Zilla Blitz and Welcome to our deep dive first look at Raiders of the deep designed by Ian Cooper and published by Compass games in this game you take command of a German ubot in World War I try to sink as much Allied Shipping as you can over the course of the war without losing your ubot your life or getting captured the design for this game is based off the model designed by Gregory Smith that was used in the hunters beneath the med and Silent Victory three popular World War II submarine games before we start out I wanted to take a moment to mention one of our Channel sponsors Noble KN games if you're looking for games like Raiders of the deep or other tabletop W games they're a great source of new and used war games and they ship internationally as well I've been using them now for about three years and for my own gaming needs and I've been really happy with the service and quality of games as they arrive links are down below let's get started as we look at everything you get inside the Box let's do a brief overview of gameplay now this was published in 2018 and again it's a soliter game that allows you to take of a German ubot at any point in World War I and there's really two elements to gameplay the first element is the individual patrols you go on these will last from a historical length of a few months or so and you're going to be going out to places like the Mediterranean the English Channel the British Isles and you're going to be trying to sink Allied Shipping but while the individual patrols are kind of the action heart of the game the spirit of the game and the element of the game that draws people back to these games is the career mode because basically you're going to be tallying together and stringing these patrols together over the entire length of a career and that career can take anywhere although the back of the box says 2 to 3 hours it can take anywhere from half an hour if things don't go very well to longer than 3 hours if you have a long and successful career where you start at the very beginning of World War I and while the hunters and Silent Victory have kind of a a a kind of a career mode built into the game one of the things that I think is a little bit different with Raiders of the deep is they've tried to highlight that career mode and flesh it out a little bit more so your commander will have a backstory in a post-war history if he makes it through the entire campaign you're going to get assigned to flotillas that will get assigned to different areas in the war for example the British Isles or the easier and more lucrative if you would at least from a hunting perspective Mediterranean their promotions and metals and you will be tracking tonnage in the log of your victories and your deep you're kind of Patrol log sheet as you go along you can get wounded there are random events of course some of which are good and some of which are bad and yes everything can go sideways and you can get killed sunk or captured to end your campaign and while all of these elements are in the predecessors like the hunted and the hunters and things like that Raiders of the deep I think really has tried to highlight this a little bit more and flesh it out a little bit more it feels a little bit deeper in this game compared to the hunters and Silent Victory if we talk about the unit scale of this game it's at the individual submarine individual ubot level individual ship level and you're basically going to be controlling one of these vessels over the course of your campaign a patrol is several months in length and again your career could be several months to an entire the entire length of World War I depending upon when you start let's jump in now and take a look at the rules there are two booklets that come with the game the first is the rules of play that we'll look at and then ubot and Target roster and let's start out by looking at the rules of play here now theoretically this is a 28-page document but if we look at the back here we get which is always appreciated as a nice print out of all the counters you should have in the game so if something you think something is missing it's always nice to be able to compare it to that uh some gameplay tips here an example of your Patrol log sheet and how you do that some data and some information on historical commanders some designer notes here so eating up a good page of these TW a good amount of these 28 Pages here uh with this kind of historical and commentary information which is always greatly appreciated then we start to dip into the rules here uh in the middle of page 20 but you'll note there are some optional rules and as in aside you can also play an austr Hungarian ubot commander in a special campaign that is included in the game as well with its own ranks and medals and historical background and Patrol types and Target types too which is really interesting to see that that's included here so with those pages out of the way it's really kind of you know 19 Pages or so here uh 20 pages of rules and if we look at these in and of themselves um you know fairly good amount of text but a lot of Graphics to kind of highlight what's what's happening if you are familiar with the hunters or silent Victory or the hunted or beneath the med uh this is very much the same system so it's Gregory Smith System Ian Cooper took that and he modified that for World War I so it's got the same level of complexity and a lot of the mechanics are going to seem really familiar um if I had to give this an overall complexity I would say this is a for um there are a number of procedural things that you'll be doing as you're going through your patrols and through your campaign with a good bit of diroll modifiers and charts you're going to be look up nothing is particularly hard although because there is so much of that it is fairly easy I found when playing these games to make little mistakes like Miss a DI roll modifier or do something a little bit inaccurate but as you play more this tends to flow pretty well I wouldn't call this a hard game and I wouldn't let the complexity of the game slow you down so one of the questions you might have right now is like okay what's the difference then between Raiders of the deep and something like the hunters or silent Victory which takes place in World War II let's talk a little bit about those things first up it the game captures a lot of the political aspects of being a ubot commander so there are restrictions on your torpedo USS there are swats of this game where you can't actually use Torpedoes from a submerged state to try to sink a ship so you have to rely on like your deck guns and other tactics there are fewer Torpedoes in the ubos the technology was not as advanced as it was before and speaking of Technology depth charges evolved over the course of World War I so in the beginning of the game in the beginning of your campaign you can't get depth charg they didn't exist however interestingly enough the uots were much technologically simpler than their you World War II counterparts submerging would take a long time and they could only go to a depth about 50 m so one of the common tactics to sink a ubo in World War I was actually physically ramming it with a ship and that's modeled in the game as well um there's a lot of historical Target data that's included in this game compared to its predecessors as we'll take a look in the next document here you're also going to have to deal with anti-submarine Nets mines and of course in World War II OTS could get sunk by planes uh that's an element in this game but it's very very rare as the historical record would show lastly there are also these things called Q ships which were warships dis Ed as Freighters and so that surprise element could actually happen to your yo you're going up and thinking you're going to be able to Target a relatively harmless freighter and it actually turns out to be a a warship armed and ready to sink you and take you to the bottom of the ocean so all of those aspects are modeled in this game so while it uses the same system a lot of the mechanics and technology is going to feel really different because this is OTS in World War I we mentioned earlier that the game also fleshes out that kind of roleplaying aspect quite a bit more than its predecessors and I think nowhere is that more evident than in this ubot and Target roster so let's take a look at this because this gives you a little bit of an idea um on how they've kind of uh enhanced and elaborated on that concept of tying into the historical record and the role playing element of your commander first up you can start at any month in World War I and you can either pick the type of uboat that was available there or you can roll a die and let the fates determine what type of Vio you get then once you've got that you can actually get a historical number for that ubo based on so if you get assigned to type u5 and it's January 1915 you can roll a six-sided die and you're going to get actually assigned that number I mean you can pick one or make one up if you want to but if you want to follow more closely to the historical record that would be a ubot that was deployed in the war at that point in time and these colors here on this chart tell you which flotilla you would be assigned to and that actually has a big bearing on the game um we'll talk about that a little bit later but uh there are it's almost like easy mode or harder mode it depending upon what the location of your flotilla there and we can see this is all fleshed out by numerous pages so if you're starting you know with a type ub2 you've got all these Ro M rols made to kind of give you the specific ubot that you could get assigned to the uo number and type now the back half of this the is the target roster and while these types of sheets exist in things like the hunters and Silent Victory with some historical targets and things like that it is way bigger in in this game these are Pages basically so if it's 1915 and it's August and you run into a small T freighter on the target roster these are historical ships that were actually sunk during that period of time you're going to make a die roll to get historical record for a ship that was sunk during that time of the war and it goes on and on so these are all the target rosters for the small freighter going through it's got more small freighter large freighter Target roster here small freighter Target roster 1917 so there just months of these just months and months of data here that really kind of bring you into the historical uh record of what ships were actually sunk and potential targets that you can get in the game then we have capital ship targets and large faders again more small freighter Target rosters from 1918 um the designer mentioned that this took a lot of time and you know seeing how much data is here I can see that this is really remarkable and then here we have the Austrian uh start date so if you want to be the austr Hungarian Commander you're going to get a different type of uh submarine and get a different type of ubo and get assigned in a different way and so that is our the extensive OTS uh the starting assignments and then the target roster that's in the game counter time there's one counter sheet in the game 280 half in counters printed on both sides a lot of it is uh duplicate inform information just to make it easier to find them although there are some uh variants that have for example these damage can turn to inoperable on the other side and things like that the game doesn't have a a map per se the action in this game happens in really two places as we'll see when we look at the player aids your ubot mat and then your uh the combat mat you're kind of bouncing back and forth between those things to track the action with these counters and this is where these counters are used so we can see a counter here to identify your ubot these are targets that you're going to be bringing onto the combat mat to display what type of targets you have these are your Torpedoes these are status markers for the cont what parts of your uboot have broken when they get hit some medals down here uh there is a crew in the game and they can gain experience there's also some special agent missions and these are used to designate your crew status then we have a bunch of other various insundry ones these are from marking uh casualties and and and wounds to your crew uh we've got flooding markers Hull damage range markers surface day night Air Attack mines ammo uh 8 mm 8.8 status then other different things in here there's a some random events that you can give you Superior Torpedoes or good luck charm to be uh could be used at an opportune moment and so all of these counters are basically used to help track all of that action in the game Let's jump in now and take a look at the player AIDS we're going to start with the ubot mats um we mentioned there's no map in the game but this really is the heart of the game if you would because there are uh 10 of these they're both printed on both two sides each one representing a different type of ubot which gives you 20 different uots uh you can use in the game here and I've noticed also on Board Game Geek there are some extra ones that people have created on their own so you can even add more to this if you would like to go even more detail for OTS of World War I now there's really uh two chunks to this uh we mention again there's no map but this is your Patrol chart so U Type U 151 it's possible patrols are to be on a flotilla in the Atlantic that's its only option right now and you're going to be moving through your ubo through these different zones to indicate when you're searching there so this is in essence a very simplified map that's going to kind of show the progression of your ubot as it goes through the patrol everything else on this ubot mat are status M markers so this is for your crew this is miscellaneous elements of your ubot things like the pariscope the wireless the batteries the hydrophones for torpedo door fuel tanks um after reloads and things up here where you keep your Torpedoes metals and rewards in the rank crew quality random events engines over here and of very critical importance Hull damage and flooding that can occur which is deadly to a ubot then we got some reload information over here so this is basically as the commander all the information you need to check on the status of your ubot and to manage your ubot as well as keeping track of where it is on uh on patrol here and we can see some of them here for example this u19 mat uh has a variety of patrols so a u19 ubot could get assigned to flotillas that are in these different areas and so all of those kind of play out as according to the historical record so this is fantastic I also like the fact that there are 20 of these um and generally you're going to stay in kind of the type of ubot you start with but there are options and events that can cause you to switch OTS to get upgrades and things like that and all of that is factored into that kind of career mode as you uh kind of unfold the history of your own ubot Commander one of the other neat player AIDS is this packet here of the uh Raiders of the deep Patrol log sheet this is kind of filling out again that roleplaying aspect and the narrative aspect where you're basically tracking the course of your career so if you're going to start here in April 15th you'll talk about the patrol location the targets that you ran into the results you're putting your ubot type and your ID and your commander and your rank and awards sunk tonnage over here so as your campaign unfolds this Patrol log sheet is going to keep a record of everything that happened and I've always find it fun to kind of look back on this and to see what happened and remember oh yeah I remember that Patrol in April of 1915 that one was pretty brutal so this a really nice touch and these are again I think available in in file format on Board Game Geek and on the compass games website so if you for whatever reason run out of these you can can make more and and and go on that way and this is the combat mat that we talked about a little bit earlier so as you're kind of going through your Patrol when you finally get some targets of opportunity and can attack this is the mat you use to track all that action now it's a relatively simple looking mat but basically over here we have as many as four targets and how big they are Torpedoes that are coming in Air Attack escort the status of surfaced or submerged as day or night the range you're coming in at and then on the right hand side here an entire little kind of encapsulation of the sequence of play to act out and kind of carry out this combat so it's a very simple mat but this is where the action of your attacks happen as we continue to look at our player AIDS uh continuing on with the idea of fleshing out this roleplaying aspect and living the life of a of a ubot commander in World War I we have some player AES that enance that this is your German Commander name chart it basically is a series of die rolles that allows you to create a unique German Commander name for your commander in the game and the backs side of this is for the austr Hungarian Commander name chart so if you don't want to pick your own name you can actually randomly generate generate one through these St rolls and that's the extent of what this entire player a does to kind of give you an idea of how how much they put some emphasis on the career element of the game connected to that um this is pre and post-war career charts so this is your early life chart so basically you're going to roll a 1 D20 and it will give you if you get an 8 it's going to say you were born on the 6th of May 1888 in Strasburg elas Elsas you joined the Navy in 1908 and served on the SMS pulmer until the war started so it feels out kind of a back history of your early military career and then should you make it to the end it gives you a final fate chart this is what happened to you after World War I W in your career as a ubot commander this is for the Germans this is for the austr Hungarian and the same thing pre and post although this is limited to a 10 a 1D 10 for the austr Hungarian career then this is the chart we talked about the color when you're rolling for your ubot number it's going to assign you to a flotilla you can pick this but if you want the game to determine it by Fate you can use this to kind of this gives you information on where it is and what kind of um where you're going to go and stuff like that and the limitations of your patrols here and this is random events chart we talked about there are some random events that can happen both good and bad this is a DI roll that determines that when those get triggered in the game then uh the core charts here I think are really these uh three charts here these are your offensive combat charts which gives you uh kind of the results of your your gun deck fire and then Torpedoes and attack damage and things like that so you're going to be using this with the combat mat to basically figure out how much damage was done and how you're going in that way and then if you have damage to your ubot um you have opportunities to repair it on the way and sometimes it's going to be completely inoperable and sometimes you'll be able to actually uh kind of fix things and go along and all of that damage is modeled here once the the combat encounter is done you have to try to get your ubot back up to speed as quickly as you can then encounter charts again are the heart of the game one of the hearts of the game because when you're in a particular area and searching on Patrol Those 3 to four day segments are going to often result in nothing where you have a little empty space there or you could run into things like ships and Capital ships and shiping an escort and stuff like that uh and these are how basically you generate those engagements and then once these engagements hit that's when you go to that combat mat to carry them out and then lastly some other ones of the combat charts are mind and aircraft so air aircut escort Air Attack escort detection chart and the ubos Damage chart when you get hit to determine where it is so you're using these uh playing AIDS basically to carry out a lot of the action rolling Dice and kind of using uh numbers to kind of figure out what happens to your ubot and to your career one of the nice touches of this game are these historical Commander cards that allow you to basically play out a campaign um as one of these specific uh famous ubot commanders of World War I so this list basically conditions of it you start the location where you are and you have special abilities here and you get this particular ubo u3 38 and it's a u31 class you get the name and some historical information then on the back side of this you get to see the result of this person's career the awards they got Hans attic cross and Etc patrols Mediterranean Sea Atlantic Atlantic Ocean the medals they received and how many ships they sank and how many tons they got so you can try to match basically the the lives of these historical commanders or play out in that way and of course that you know that's probably something you'd want to do as after you've played a few times in your own individual campaigns but a really nice touch to have this in the game lastly before we wrap up just mention that you get a bunch of dice for the game two six-sided dice uh two 10-sided dice die and then a 20-sided die uh to kind of help pick out things from the different charts as your career unfolds here and the results of attacks and all these kinds of things the last thing I'd like to mention as we sum up here U this game was published six years ago as I'm making this first look video there is an arat sheet on Board Game Geek and I believe it's also on Compass games website uh the designer is very heavily engaged on Board Game Geek and supporting the game and was is really nice to see so when there's questions he's in there answering things like that and he's also created this at a sheet um as of 2021 I don't think there's been any additional things added to it since then um a very kind of list of maybe 15 20 things where there's either clarifications or additions to the rules or a correction to the rues so a very modest arat sheet for a game of of this scope and kind of data amount and it's all right there so I would recommend downloading that and printing that out and having that handy as you're playing um and it's great to see the designer make this and follow up with the the post support of the game Past release the last topic I'd like to address is the question of agency in the game now agency in the game basically means that how much do you as the player influence the results and the the actions and the outcome of the game and how much is it kind of on Rails where things just happen to you and they're unavoidable and you're like well there's nothing I could do about that and my ubo sank uh and within these games there are a couple groups of players if you would there are players who feel games like the hunters in silent Victory and I would put this game in that same category are really kind of there's a lot of deterministic elements to them and you don't do much as a player um I played a lot of the hunters and I've played a lot of Silent Victory and looking at Raiders of the deep I feel like the gameplay really is modeled after that I've always been really happy with the amount of agency in these games yes the fates can kill you and they can kill you in nasty and quick and painful ways it can happen there are certain points in a career where no matter what you do you very well could heavier uboat sunk and you die campaign over it could just slam you down but I find the amount of of agency in the game to be very historically representative and so often you're making those calls as to risk versus reward do you go in against that capital ship when your uo's already a little bit damaged or do you let caution hold Sway and you hold back and live to fight another day when do you try to run when do you fight how much do you go in with where do you attack all of these decisions I feel like kind of wrap around this and you're playing the odds right it's it's a gamble here everything is risk an element of risk you're adding more risk to get potential reward I really like the decision Matrix that's in these games with the understanding that yes they can just end your game automatically you can be unlucky and it's all over but a lot of it I find that you can play deeper into campaigns if you're using good strategies and tactics but you can't be too cautious either because if you're too cautious you're never going to sink anything so it's a fascinating decision Matrix that I've always liked and I'm perfectly comfortable with the amount of agency the player has in this game that doesn't mean this is for you if you really need a game where you're going to be able to control everything and sometimes feel like the fates just didn't get you one way or the other this may not be a series for you but if you're comfortable with giving up some of that agency I feel like this has a nice historical blend of good decisions and letting the fates also play a role in your campaign and there we have it Raiders of the deep from Compass games designed by Ian Cooper if you want to see an example of this type of gameplay you might be interested in our series on the hunters where we start with the German ubot in World War II and see how far we can go thanks for watching everybody have a great day

Channel: Zilla Blitz

Views: 4,694

Keywords: raiders of the deep, ian cooper, gregory smith solo games, raiders of the deep compass games, unboxing, compass games, ian cooper compass games, ian cooper raiders of the deep, raiders of the deep review, raiders of the deep unboxing, solo submarine board games, solitaire wargames, solo wargames, good uboat games, ww1 uboat games, ww1 solo games, the hunters, silent victory, raiders of the deep first look, solo submarine games, solitaire uboat games

Id: Rey4MpfXDr0

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2024