USS Laffey is live (Survive the Kamikaze attacks)
Update: USS Laffey: The Ship That Would Not Die has launched on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 16 days. You may pledge for a copy of the game, or for the PnP. The company doesn't ship to Europe.
Our preview post below was published on May 21.
USS Laffey: The Ship That Would Not Die is a solitaire roll 'n' write game in which you are commanding the USS Laffey during the invasion of Okinawa in WWII. The ship will be under kamikaze attacks, and your goal is to defeat all enemy aircrafts. It will launch on Kickstarter sometime early next week (May 24-26).
The game comes with notepads that show a diagram of the ship. You will have two damage control teams represented by cubes, and will roll and allocate dice to either repair the ship or attack the aircrafts. A red D10 will be rolled on behalf the Japanese, to determine the hits they deal to your ship.
The ship consists of 19 compartments, each with 8 health. 9 compartments are fore and 9 are aft. One compartment in the middle is the fuel tanks. If a compartment loses all its health, it is destroyed. When a compartment takes a hit, you will draw a coloured shape on it depending on the type of damage it received: if it is a leak, you draw a blue square; if it is fire, you draw a red circle; if it is debris, you draw a black dot, and if it is an explosion, you draw a black dot and draw black dots in all adjacent bubbles.
Each round is split in 6 phases. Phase 1 is Assign Damage Control Teams: you send your cubes to different compartments to activate their abilities, and may also repair them. Phase 2 is Enemy Aircraft: the next enemy aircraft attacks you, and you note the damage down. Phase 3 is Planning: you roll six D10 and lock as many as you want. You can re-roll twice if you don't like the results. Phase 4 is Resolve: you resolve your dice results in ascending order. Depending on your rolls, you can do Bridge actions, hit enemies, extinguish fires or fix leaks, but if you roll high, you may instead have a fire or leak spread. Phase 5 is Leak Spreads: a leak in a compartment spreads. Phase 6 is Fire Spreads: a fire in a compartment spreads.
If you take 8 damage to the Bridge, or have any two compartments destroyed, you lose the game. Otherwise, if you survive long enough to beat all the aircrafts, you win.
Well, it is Roll-'n-Write, but it looks okay. The goal on KS is only $600/€492/C$725. That's pretty modest, but I guess there isn't too much to the game, component-wise.