Picked up rules, but seems like having a starter set is important for some of the components such as the wake markers. Could probably work around that, though. Also looks like you need to create ship cards for anything not packaged for the game, which wouldn't be a big deal, they stat out a number of ships in the rule book. Watched it played at the local game store, players seemed to be enjoying it, I'd jumped in to play a similar small boats mini game with a couple of them a week or two before, that might have been 1:350 but I forget the name of the game, guy I know who brought the game and minis had a pretty good collection but he wasn't there when some of the others were trying out Cruel Seas. Scale for Cruel Seas is kind of crazy big, the minesweeper on the table looked enormous (I don't think it was an official mini though). I might re-purpose some WAS battleships as destroyers and some merchant ships as armed trawlers if I get around to taking it up. Don't really want to buy and assemble the minis at the scale the game is designed for though.