Cold War Naval Battles

Module for Vassal Engine - version 3.1.20

Module version: 0.9beta (14/10/12)

Disclaimer

This module has been edited by Francesco Manini - mano82 - 2012.

The original game Cold War Naval Battles (formerly Modern Naval Battles) has been created by Dan Verssen and developed by Alan Emrich. All rights on the game are theirs. The original graphics have been realised by RBM Graphics and Design Studio.

The present module may be distributed freely but for no means shall be given for money. The creator of this module will never ask for money for expansion or maintenance of the module.

The source game can be find for free download at this link: http://www.relativerange.com/

How to use this module

This version of the module (0.9beta) contains cards and rules from CWNB 1 rules set.

1. Every player has three boards, of which 2 are private and 1 public.
   • The public board is the TASK FORCE board where each player shall position his ships and most of the action takes place. This board is visible to all and modifiable by all in order to put damage cards on target ships.
   • The private boards are respectively the action cards hand board and the victory points (VP) board. These boards are neither visible nor editable by other players except the proprietary. The Hand is where to keep the action cards; the VP is where to move the enemy destroyed ships (for Victory Points counting purposes).
2. The boards are reachable through the button "BOARDS" and the appropriate sub-menus.
3. The Common Deck button opens the board where the common decks are placed. They are: the action card deck, the ships deck, the player order deck.
   • the player order deck contains the cards used to determine the player order. Before starting a new game, one player should find and remove the unused cards depending on the number of players (i.e. 3 players: keep cards from 1 thru 3). The deck auto-shuffles when keys are returned.
   • the Action Card deck is the place where the action cards are placed and taken. The deck is auto-shuffled. It is possible to select multiple card draw (via right-click mouse). Next to the action card deck is its discard area. When the action card deck depletes a round is over (no automatisms implemented so far to manage the multi-round match)
   • the ships deck has a red notification card on it: before beginning a new game, one player shall remove the red notification card and manually shuffle the deck via right-click mouse option. After that you can normally deal and take cards (multiple card draw option is enabled)
4. The FoW button is the Fog of War die launcher. A notification message with the result is shown in the message area
5. The die symbolic button throws one 6-faced die (1d6)
6. The notes window is intended to keep track of players' victory points during multi-round games
7. Reference window contains various player aids directly scanned from the rules PDF booklet

Special properties

Action Cards

• All action cards, when on the board, may be turned in the 4 position (N-S-W-E), via right-click menu or CTRL-M (cw rotation) or CTRL-N (ccw rotation).
• Damage cards do not stack on the boards and they're coded to be always behind other cards: this means that you can position them freely on the board. This property, added to the previous one, allows to position the damage cards under the damaged ships.
• Action cards are discarded with CTRL-D key combination

Ship Cards

Ship cards have various layers that help for better identification during play

• With the key press CTRL-T you (or your adversaries) can identify the ship as being targeted by one of your attack cards (no active link between the attacking card and the ship card at the moment). Press again CTRL-T to remove the marker
• You can keep track of the damage of one ship via the CTRL-H (Hit) key-press; or remove damage with CTRL-R. The keys CTRL-C clears completely the damage recorded.
• The flip command CTRL-F will turn the card to its back (i.e. Active/Passive state for subs, Normal/Crippled for special ships)

Player order Cards

• before the game starts you should delete the unused player order cards. To do so you should select the DELETE option via the right-click menu of the card. Be careful that this operation is not reversible. To have a full deck of Player order cards again you have to restart the module.
• to send the player order cards back to the deck just press CTRL-R. They're automatically shuffled.