Golden Counters: The Naval Edition
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2007

Our first sheet of free counters for our Gold Club members is finally on the presses, after all sorts of backstage drama. We went with a naval set this time, for the most part. I’d really wanted to go with a full-sized sheet this first time out, 140 standard half-inch counters and 70 “long” ship counters, but since all of the production delays were on the “small” side we finally just gave in and chopped it in half to get a much-delayed item finally into your hands.

Thus there are 70 pieces on the sheet. Just over half of them (36) are the U.S. Navy “four stack” destroyers from Strike South, Eastern Fleet, Bismarck, Leyte Gulf and Midway. It’s a nice addition to each game — while these were older vessels, in most of those games (the first three anyway) they were still used as fleet destroyers and I would have liked to give them big counters all along. Now you have them.

Italy has the eight destroyers of the Freccia class, which have not appeared in Daily Content as of this writing, but will have by the time you get the counter sheet. They appear in Bomb Alley on “small” counters, and sizing them was a difficult choice. I usually start work on naval games by sketching out the scenarios I want to cover, listing the ships involved. When I went back to finish the Bomb Alley set, I found I’d overlooked a few key pieces — the target ship Centurion that I really wanted in the game, and some cruisers and destroyers I just plain missed. Something had to give, and the Freccia class was pushed over to small pieces. I only needed six additional Brits so that did free up a slot for the German helicopter carrier.

There’s also the Italian Affondatore, the counter we did to illustrate my Daily Content piece on Vittorio Cuniberti’s original dreadnought battleship design. With the counter sheet proof in my hands, I’m now regretting not putting six on them on there (Cuniberti’s recommendation) and a scenario on the website allowing them to sink entire fleets of British or French pre-dreadnoughts. By herself “the sinker” is still pretty formidable though.

From William Sariego’s fine tandem of pieces on the French submarine Surcouf, we have the big white elephant in both Second World War at Sea and Great War at Sea formats, so she can be used with Bismarck or U.S. Navy Plan Gold. I like the style Beth used on this one; it’s an experiment toward a look we’ll employ in an as-yet-unannounced game for 2008.

Much like the Freccia class, several British A-class destroyers have been given short shrift in some games. Navies have been very uncooperative in wartime, refusing to deploy ships in neat 70-ship blocks to conform to our counter sheets. When you have space for 140 “long” ship counters and 142 pieces that need to go there, the boss doesn’t grant an extra sheet to let you have your two ships plus 68 more to play with. Two of them have to be reduced. These particular victims suffered in Eastern Fleet and Bomb Alley. We did “long” counter A-class destroyers in Strike South (the Dutch “Admirals”) but I really didn’t like the counter graphic much and this is a new drawing.

Japanese destroyers got the same treatment — most of these are older ones from Strike South and Eastern Fleet, from the Kamikaze class. I also added class members that appear in Leyte Gulf, even though they had been reduced to escort roles by then. Two seaplane carriers that were disrespected in Midway get full-sized pieces here.

And finally, I wanted to give one of our discontinued games a last hurrah, so the sheet has five pieces from our Eylau I Corps variant. We’re doing Napoleonic Battles once again, but the new-model games have changed so much that we consider them a new series, and they use larger counters than these.

The next set of counters will be the 140 small pieces, bearing all manner of variant pieces from many games. With our new experienced crew we seem to be over the production difficulties of past years and have many products flowing for this year.

The counter sheets are free with your Gold Club membership, so hurry and sign up if you’re not a member. Gold Club members (ONLY) can purchase extra sheets at $10. Availability is limited to first-come/first-served, so you’ll have to call or write for these.