From: Doug Murphy Subject: Review: Fast Attack Boats: A Game of the Arab-Israeli Naval War 1973 by Yanquito Publications 1980 Fast Attack Boats (FAB) was published as an "album" game by Yanquito in early 1980. The game is introductory level and simulates the naval war between missile boats of the Arabs and Israelis in the Yom Kippur War of Oct. 1973. You get 8 pages of rules, a player aid card, 179 counters (mostly Komars, Osas, M43s, Saar-class boats, some IS DDs and various marks of Styx and Gabriel missiles and torpedoes and the 12 by 24 inch mapboard album. There are two game formats: Battle games which are tactical match ups between small squadrons and Strategic games: IS vs. Syria & Eygpt fleets. Boat units have an overhead view of the boat, number of missiles carried & type, gunnery factor, range, movement factor, "ram" factor and name. The map is just blue water hexes. Units are p laced face up on the map edge with missile counters stacked on top. Both players choose fleets for the Battle game up to certain point values. Battle game sequence of play: arab move / resolve ram combat / Is move / resolve ram combat, resolve gun combat simultaneously, arab missiles move, Is missiles move, missile hits resolved. As you can see, the game is pretty straightforward. Resolve combat on a CRT w/ columns for appropriate missiles, gun factors. Damage in %. Once % reaches 100, boat sunk or can be immediately sunk. Damaged boats move slower and lost gunnery factors. If you ram an enemy boat, consult the ram column on the CRT w/ differences between ram factors as drm. Each boat fires guns individually at one target. Missiles move a certain number of hexes and range dependent on type. Last boat on the board wins. There is no ECM except by what is built into the CRT by misses. (in the real war, IS ECM made the historical battles extremely one-sided. See also the latest issue of Command for a nice article on the IS-Sy naval war.) The Strategic Game is more interesting. Generally, it consists of a string of up to ten Battles. Players deploy inverted units (Arab first) on game charts which correspond to "rounds" which are divided into "segments" and may include up to 2 battles. Boats may be shifted one round on the charts. Boats finding themselves in a certain segment of certain rounds are deployed on the map for a Battle. This allows IS to shift units between Egypt and Syria. There is a three player version which is most fun as it doesn't allow Egy and Syr to easily gang up on IS. This simple game is literally a blast: your boats zip around and launch missiles at each other. Missiles miss or zap some unsuspecting target (tactical formations are important). The strategic game is most fun as it keeps you guessing on deployments. I created a chart to play the Arab side deployments so I could game solitaire. Doug (dmurphy@wppost.depaul.edu)