Far Side of the World:
Design Notes
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
June 2025

Great War at Sea games built the original Avalanche Press, and now we’re re-launching the entire series with new series rules. This is the first time we’ve brought out a new rulebook for our original series. It’s a momentous occasion for us, though that’s mostly inside baseball. What it means for the world of gaming, is that we’re bringing back the world’s foremost series of World War One naval games (it’s also, as far as I know, the only one).

Great War at Sea: Far Side of the World is the outlier in the group. Where other Great War at Sea games are played on an operational map showing just the area of conflict (the North Sea, Mediterranean, Caribbean or Sea of Japan), Far Side of the World uses a world-wide strategic map divided into areas. Very large areas, since we’re looking at the entire globe. It’s the same map we used in our old Cruiser Warfare game.

Cruiser Warfare was a very good game, but we’d run out of pieces to keep it in print, and the artwork from the old game simply is not up to our current standards. The sharp reproduction would highlight every flaw. So, I drew new art for all of the ships (some of the drawings had already shown up in other places, like our Iron Dogs Golden Journal).

And while that was a lot of work (I can’t emphasize this point enough), it also was an enormous opportunity. Great War at Sea has two types of pieces for warships. Large ones go on double-sized pieces, with top-down artwork. Small ones go on standard square pieces. The old Cruiser Warfare’s set of pieces was greatly crimped for space, and a number of ships I would have preferred to place on the bigger pieces had to settle for square ones.

That’s partly due to the realities of old-school die-cutting, which limited us to a small number of standard cutting patterns. Now that we’re free of the last century’s technology, we can mix-and-match patterns as we like. That allowed me to switch a bunch of ships to the beautiful, double-sized pieces, including odd-looking ones like the ancient French protected cruisers.

In terms of game-play, that doesn’t really change things. Except that it does. It’s simply much more fun to play with pieces like this. And they’re our standard silky-smooth type, which means that they’re free of the massive damage inflicted by high-pressure die-cutting under the old technology.

And then there’s the game. At the outbreak of World War One in August 1914, the German Navy maintained a squadron of armored and light cruisers at the colony of Tsingtao in China. Far Side of the World is the story of the German East Asia Cruiser Squadron’s attempt to steam around the world from China back home to Germany, and the actions of other German cruisers against Allied commerce. While the German ships are well-crewed, they are coal-burners constantly seeking fuel supplies and they must cover an enormous distance to reach their goal (while inflicting punishment on the Allies along the way). The Allied player has overwhelming, mostly British force (and it gets even stronger in the eastern Pacific, once the Japanese enter the fray), but the Central Powers (there’s also one ancient, useless Austrian cruiser) have an awful lot of ocean in which to hide (with a few exceptions, all of it, though it’s hard to find coal in the Bering Sea).

When I designed the original Cruiser Warfare game, the Central Powers player had the ultimate goal of getting the cruiser squadron back to Germany, with a rich reward for completing the anabasis. The first developer took that out to encourage more commerce raiding, which I thought went against the history behind the game. Though Maximilian von Spee kept his own counsel regarding his ultimate goal, he was headed toward Germany, and I find the quixotic nature of the doomed voyage to underlie the tragic nature of the story. I should have overruled the developer, since I was also the publisher as well as the designer, but in those days, I thought it important to keep those roles separately. I’ve become more embittered since, though not much wiser. I put that ultimate goal back into the game for Far Side of the World.

It’s actually not likely that the Germans can make it back to Germany; they’re going to win the game by going out in a blaze of glory, inflicting as much damage on the Allies as possible and keeping valuable enemy fleet units tied down far away from European waters. It’s kind of difficult a century later to determine just what Spee had in mind when he set out across the Pacific; he appears to have given up the notion of returning to Germany but continued to tell his men that they were headed for home. The Central Powers player can still win without a triumphant return, and most Central Powers wins in game terms probably will come without such an event.

That enhanced set of pieces also allowed for even more play options than we had in the old Cruiser Warfare, like the pair of German dreadnoughts that visited Brazil just before the outbreak of war remaining there when the hostilities actually begin. Variable entry of the Allied powers, or a Central Powers-aligned Italy (adding one crapulent cruiser, but more coaling possibilities). Another German cruiser squadron, this one based in German East Africa. Stronger Allied presence in distant waters. German battle cruisers entering the Atlantic from home or the Mediterranean, to stretch Allied defenses. A battle cruiser stationed in the Far East from the start (something the High Seas Fleet considered).

The game plays very differently than any other Great War at Sea game, with more emphasis on the “game” part than most. With no plotting by the Allied player, and only a few fleets under Central Powers command, the game moves even faster than the usual Great War at Sea contest and you’ll have an easier time luring the unwary into playing it with you again and again. Fuel use, for example, is much simpler than in the standard rules. Since coal (both its use and the quest to obtain more) is such a driving force in this game, much more so than in the others, the rules themselves need to be very straightforward.

While Far Side of the World has its own, unique rules for strategic movement (with a lot of emphasis on coal), the tactical portion (where the ships fight each other) is right out of the Second Edition standard series rules, modified to suit the new environment. With only a handful of dreadnought-type ships in the mix and most of those confined to the optional set-up variants, play on the tactical map tends to move very quickly. The edition change also gave me the excuse to give the rules a thorough re-write, and make sure the game stood alone without assuming familiarity with other Great War at Sea games.

Like most of our games, Far Side of the World comes packaged in our Playbook format (there’s no box). Like other Great War at Sea games, it has enormous re-play value, with variable starting situations (almost all of them revolving around Graf von Spee’s mad scheme) and variable forces for both sides, and nine battle scenarios involving only combat on the Naval Tactical Map.

Right now, Gold Club members can snare an upgrade set with the beautiful new pieces and the new rules/scenario set. If you already own the game, it’s worth having.

Order Far Side of the World Here.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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