State of Play (quick take): The Hunt

 

  

The Hunt: little board, big ocean.

Last Wednesday we lost our Chief of Security to an unseen menace in our third session of Mothership 1E (Tuesday Knight Games). But I’m not here to talk about that.

Last week, our host, B, asked me if I could get over earlier to squeeze in a short game before dinner. After some juggling, I managed to get over about an hour and ten before anyone else was due.

The game on offer was The Hunt (Salt & Pepper Games, 20230, designed by Matthias Cramer and Engin Kunter (now, I believe, Engin Cramer). This was my first play of a Salt & Pepper game. I bought Maurice Suckling’s Operation Barclay (Salt & Pepper Games, 2024) earlier this ear, but alas, haven’t got it to the table yet.

The Graf Spee status display at the bottom edge of the board,
with the Oiler Altmark on station inn hex 24.

Salt & Pepper specialise in small footprint games that offer immersive, out-sized play experiences. The Hunt is a cat-and-mouse game of hidden movement and subterfuge, abstractly playing out the interdiction operations of the over-gunned German cruiser (or “pocket” battleship) Admiral Graf Spee, operating in the South Atlantic during the early part of the Second World War against British commercial shipping. One player plays the Germans, operating the (hidden) Graf Spee and an oiler for resupply, while the British player begins with one task force on the hunt for the German cruiser, and two convoys heading either to or from the United Kingdom. These are the targets for the Graf Spee.

The Cruiser is never actually on the board; it’s not represented by a playing piece. Instead, its location is hidden from the British player, its movements recorded by the German player who each turn writes down the speed (number of hexes moved) and registers the new location (the board’s hexes are numbered). Operations from turn to turn are conducted by playing cards for their points value (or for their event, which will sometimes dictate a number of points the player is allowed to expend after committing the event function). Each player has their own deck of Event cards, and these are also used in combat rounds.

Card sample. These are from the British deck, (pictured top right), and can be used for
their Action Points value, the Event described on the bottom half of the card, or as an
assist to a search (the bottom band with the pictured binoculars and hint markers).

The German player must try to avoid the Task Force (or potentially Task Forces as the game progresses), and attempt to sink the commercial shipping, which it can do by conducting a successful search.

In the space of an hour we managed nearly two games – to be fair, the first game was just three rounds long, resulting in a successful search for the cruiser by the British Task Force. Combat ensued between the Graf Spee and the Task Force, resulting in a win for the Kriegsmarine. We were about six rounds into the second game with maybe another two before things came to a head, but the others were arriving so we decided to pull up stumps.

Task Force G escorts a convoy headed to Britain, sure that
the German cruiser must surely be close.

The Hunt is an engaging game, brilliant in its simplicity and depth of play. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of what is going on here. I’ll be able to talk more analytically and less gushy about is after a couple more plays, so stay tuned.