You are a German submarine commander, going on a hunt for Allied ships at the beginning of 1941. In next few years you have to sink as many ships as you can, scoring enough tonnage to win the game.

Components:
54 cards with variable usage. Cards are split into: Air Attacks, Ships and Escorts. Ships can come into three different sizes with different tonnage as: Small Freighter, Medium Freighter and Large Tanker.
Escorts come into three different types: Green, Trained and Veteran Escort. Escort ships also are marked with a big letter E on the top right edge of a card.

Game objective:
Play 2 patrols per month (each month is split into 15 days period, or two weeks), sink ships and record their tonnage, until the end of December of 1943, if you survive that long. Depending on the tonnage.

you sank you will either achieve total victory, some kind of consolation victory or total defeat. Dying in this game is considered a defeat.

Sequence of Play:
You are doing one patrol per 15 days (half of the month), starting from January of 1941.
Each patrol is consistent of encounters. Number of encounters depends on you, but the type is always random.
Your Patrol starts by drawing one card and using its Encounter value.

– If its an Air Attack! You will not have an option to react or do any action. Draw one card to see how many depth charges airplane has used to hit you, then draw that much cards for damage. Then, if you are not sunk by that attack, decide to either return to base or have another encounter.
– If its a Group encounter, first draw a card to establish a time of day and weather (using both icons in a row from that card) and then draw number of random ships to form a group and continue to battle phase. Same thing is done for a Convoy encounter, but you must form a specific group of ships and escorts.
– Battle phase – torpedo attack – may have up to 2 rounds
– Before starting with a torpedo attack you may use an action called WAIT. If you are not satisfied with a current day of time and weather, you may replace that card with the new one from the top of the deck. You have to keep the new card and you can only perform this action once per battle phase.
– You may also decide to DISENGAGE and skip the battle phase after you have form a group of ships. But, you can do this only once per Patrol! If you do it again you must return to base immediately, ending a patrol for that month.
– To attack ships chose your targets and then depending on the weather you my fire up to 6 or up to 8 torpedoes by drawing cards from a deck and placing them face down in a column, under your targeted ships. You may split number of fired torpedoes per target as you wish, you may also decide not to fire a full complement. You my fire at multiple targets of your choice.

Marking your tonnage and time passage You can either use a chart provided with the game or keep a diary in a RPG style of writing. In both cases you must mark that half of a month has passed and write down your tonnage you manage to score from your patrol.

If your submarine had 4 to 5 damage, you must skip half of a month before going to another patrol. If you manage to survive whole three years (1941-1943), summarize all tonnage and consult the chart below to see how did you do.

-description from designer

Silent Hunter 1941-43

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