Thanks you for the recommendations, Simon! It definitely sounds like the campaign is the better route to go in order to experience more of what the game has to offer. I’ve been playing lots of campaign-style games, or at least games that require around 10+ plays, and I may have rushed past this one.

Appreciate the tip on the La Spezia board I spotted it while learning the game, and now have something else to try out. Thank you for creating and sharing it, and here’s to hoping I’ll be back someday to give the campaign a try!

For the randomness, I have to agree to a certain level, but push you luck actions become a lot more reliable once your operator’s skills have increased. Until then, rolling for actions with one die should only be practiced in desperate situations.

For the tokens I also have to agree, but not so much on the writing on it as it is only important for historic correct setups (which I don’t use). My problem comes more from the size of game board spaces and the wooden counters that block the view on you SLCs. So spaces with 1 SLC, 2 Patrol Craft, a Navy Vessel and a detection token can be kind of crowded.

For the limited replay ability I’am using my own variants and mods. I know most people can only enjoy a game if it is perfect right of the box, but for me games like BSAS are a wonderful sandbox to expand with my own ideas.

If you want to make the most out of you BSAS experience: Organize the counters by VP value and skip the historic correct setup. Play the custom campaign, not just single missions. Play the first scenarios very passive. Bail your crews out if things get messy. Focus on skill increasing and survival of the crew.

And last but not least: Have a look at my La Spezia game board on BGG. It serves as a beginner and intermezzo scenario for the custom campaign.

I hope you will give the game another go, even if your initial experience was not the best.

Simon

Definitely gives off a serious vibe with those tokens! Establishing a cadence is something I was actually just thinking about today, and how some games help establish that sooner. It helps a lot when learning a game, but also when playing in general if it all flows well.

My preference for dice always changes. These ones just felt particularly rude with the way they refused to roll! I still prefer ways where I’m not guaranteed success, yet it’s nice to feel like I have some degree of control over the outcome.

I agree with your comment; particularly in a game like this (or the Leader series, where I’ve played Hornet and Thunderbolt/Apache) where you’ve got a bunch of steps that need to be resolved in the exact right order, a list of exactly what to do when is very helpful in finding the rhythm of the game (and then one can go off and dig into the rules for the details).

I find it very frustrating when I know I did everything right but the dice make it go wrong. Realistic, of course, but not so much if I’m trying to achieve a win percentage or other campaign-type goal. (On the other hand, I own all of D-Day Dice second edition.)