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I've seen a lot of games based on Ww2... or far off into the future.

Are there any decent naval warfare games based in our current era?

Shipwreck is one on the Wargame Vault is the closest I can think of.

Harpoon if you want hyper-realistic simulation where seconds takes hours to play.

This is a tough period to make work for a ton of reasons. The two biggest being the "scale" and the second being very asymmetrical forces engaged/limited number of Naval combatants.

 Easy E wrote:
Shipwreck is one on the Wargame Vault is the closest I can think of.

Harpoon if you want hyper-realistic simulation where seconds takes hours to play.

This is a tough period to make work for a ton of reasons. The two biggest being the "scale" and the second being very asymmetrical forces engaged/limited number of Naval combatants.

It doesn't need to be a surface fleet game... I'll take the silent service too.

What scale are you thinking? How many ships/boats do you want to control?

 Easy E wrote:
What scale are you thinking? How many ships/boats do you want to control?

I have a friend (who was a weatherman in the navy) who showed interest in wargaming, but when I showed him some sci-fi ship combat games, he lost interest "due to the whole space thing."

He said he'd rather play something that takes place "today" - So I thought I would go to the place where I knew would have answers....

Scale isn't too important l, just something fun.

Yet another navy man who left the navy, but whom the navy can't leave?

Yeah, you should probably take a look as Shipwreck then if you want mini-gaming.

However, most Modern Naval stuff is more at the board game level now thanks to the scale of most modern naval battles.

Thank you very much. I'm doing my best to convert the masses.

One of my acquaintances who pondered doing modern (meaning after the Second World War) naval combat eventually told me he didn't really like anything on offer due to the fact that there's very little action but a lot of calculation, and due to the specifics of modern-day naval combat it's just tiny blips shooting colored tiny blips into each other until one of the blips is gone.

Honestly? Captain Sonar with a big group

Otherwise modern fleet assets seem to work best when abstracted as part of a wider map game.

Captain Sonar is great fun with groups of 6-8 people.

However, that does not fit what they OP was looking for.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Yet another navy man who left the navy, but whom the navy can't leave?

It is well known the navy doesn't leave seamen behind.

No there are not, for the simple reason that modern naval combat have too large distances.

We are easily talking say 200km range, most likely more, heck at that range you are playing with pinheads for scale and a totaly open blue board as islands makes 0 reason to add, and due to radar it is all about who spots who as things are wiped out by missiles or airplanes right after.
That is why WW2 is the limit of how modern you can have tabletop games, idealy you want to stop at age of sail or steampunk/fantasy era.

So the choice is basicly card games, like this: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1668/modern-naval-battles, or age of sail.

So all scifi fleet games are just reskinned Age of Sail or WW2 games?

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
So all scifi fleet games are just reskinned Age of Sail or WW2 games?

Yup. When you start dabbeling with 3rd dimension, rules gets tricky or complex. And if we look at the goat of GW, aka BF:gothic, then the stem of the base was the actual space that the ships occupied on a 4x6 table, the model was just there so we had something to look at instead of a stem on a base.

For the more realism oriented spaceship games, it is all charts, maps, tokens and cards, no models. (as an example; https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3662/battlefleet-mars-space-combat-in-the-21st-century

of topic:
Take modern land based combat, a ww2 russian T34-85 had an effective range of nearly 2km. Fast forward to the 90s, the T90 has an effective range of 6km.., how are you going to get something like that represented on the board unless the models are 3-6mm large and you are playing on a say, 6x10 board?? (this issue goes even down to small arms)

Rewind back to age of sail, effective range for a ship cannon back then was only a few hundred meters. Only fixed long gun on forts could reach 1km or longer. Flintlock small arms less then 100m. That is something that works just fine on a 6x4 table at any scale. That is also why airplane games are best capped at ww1.

I've learned a lot.

Maybe submarine games would be better than surface fleet games.

I remember Harpoon being a tabletop game back in the day.

Harpoon is still around, but you really do not need miniatures. It is more the charts and maps variety of game. It also simulates seconds of "real-life" actions in hours of playing time.

Osprey has a Submarine board game called They Come Unseen but I have never played it.

If you are okay with a 40K riff on wet-naval and submarine combat drop me a PM. I might have something of interest for you...... not remotely modern though.