By Stealth and Sea

By Stealth and Sea is a game based on the frankly incredible undertakings of the Italian diving teams of WWII. With a naval force that couldn’t rival the allied forces they were pitched against, the Italians came up with a plan to torpedo British ships in the Mediterranean by piloting the aquatic missiles into position, using divers, before detonating them once these sub-mariner warriors had swam clear of the blast zone.

As well is being fraught with risk of being spotted, captured, or shot, the divers also had to contend with the torpedoes themselves, which were rife with technical problems. In the game, you control several such diving teams and your goal is to carry out the missions successfully, fighting not only the enemy, but the haphazard nature of your own equipment. You can play a single mission, a custom campaign of distinct missions, or recreate the narrative of the Italian crews as they operated in history.

Gameplay is a combination of dice and cards, with the odds stacked against you on both. Each round represents an hour of ‘mission time’ during which you move your subs across the board (broken into hexes) to try and get them to the targets. But as simple as that sounds there’s a veritable cascade of things going wrong: the various component parts of the sub, the floodlights sleeping the water, the patrols sent out to find (and attack) you. Everything in the game screams risk – not just in the external threats, but how you manage them: everything you do costs you action points, and each torpedo gets a paltry two to spend in every turn. You can guarantee success on certain actions by spending both your available points – or, you can gamble on success by spending just one of them and rolling a die for success instead. This latter route is a tempting way to push on in a mission where time is fast slipping away, but it can often be the path to catastrophic failure as well. Your torpedoes need to dive, surface, steer, accelerate: and close the distance between themselves and the target. When you keep rolling duds and various constituent parts of your equipment is failing – well, By Stealth and Sea can feel brutally punishing.

The harsh landscape of the narrative is why By Stealth and Sea is best played as a campaign. A single mission can feel like a bludgeoning, but when you play through a sequence of them not only do you start to get a better sense of when the risk is more calculable, you also get to know your divers and the wisdom and knowledge they gain in one mission gives them experience points to spend on subsequent ones, investing the undertaking with both a sense of story and escalation, as some personnel fall by the wayside while others become grizzled old veterans: assuming of course, they make it back alive. So much in By Stealth and Sea comes down to a single, pivotal die roll, that players who like to feel in control of their destiny won’t enjoy it. But then what the real divers undertook at the time was so crazy, and fraught with inherent risk, that often rolling and hoping for the best feels like the closest we could possibly get to an accurate depiction.