'Jutland': The New Stuff
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2006

In 1998, we followed up on our very successful Great War at Sea: Mediterrranean with the North Sea version, which our advertising alternately called “North Sea” or “Northern Waters” or even worse, “Great War at Sea II.” It was the most expensive game we’d ever published and would remain so until the release of Leyte Gulf in late 2005. Even so, it sold extremely well and eventually sold out in 2003 despite a couple of reprints.

Change is the universe’s only constant, and to bring the subject back into print we decided to create a more-or-less new game, starting with the title. “Volume 2: The North and Baltic Seas,” as the cover of the old game states, says pretty much nothing. But Jutland is the most studied battle in naval history, and so the new game takes its title from the centerpiece battle.

In the original edition we had 390 “long” ship pieces and 280 standard half-inch pieces. This has gone up considerably, to 490 “long” pieces and 420 normal-sized ones. We didn’t re-use any of the old game’s components; this is a new and much larger set.

There are new ships for the Royal Navy: the battle cruiser Leopard, the battleship India, and quite a few more. Others that appeared in the old edition have had their strengths re-calculated; for example, the British “semi-dreadnoughts” of the Lord Nelson class have gone from 4-0-0 gunnery strengths (primary-secondary-tertiary) to 3-6-2. Secondary and tertiary factors for battleships have been reduced pretty much across the board.

And we’ve answered one of the strangest and most persistent requests from Great War at Sea fans: the game has British monitors. Scads of British monitors (well, a dozen of them anyway). Terribly slow vessels with heavy guns, they were used to bombard the German-held coastline of Belgium. In scenarios featuring them, the British player will have to escort them to their stations and hope the Germans don’t catch them at sea.

Several classes of British cruisers now are represented by a second piece reflecting the gunnery upgrades they received during the course of the war. One piece is used in scenarios drawn from the war’s early years, and the other (usually more capable) piece is used in late-war scenarios. A number of German cruisers had this in the old version, but we neglected to provide this for their British counterparts. And then there are some ships that had only small pieces with silhouettes that now have lovely full-sized pieces, like the German light cruiser Hela or the British Adventure class of scout cruisers. The Russians have all of their Svietlana-class cruisers this time, and the awesome projected 1914 program battleship with nine 16-inch guns.

There are new navies as well: the Danish, Norwegian and Dutch fleets each bring a number of “coastal” battleships along, plus assorted light craft. And in the German and British navies, the “hull numbers” identifying ships have been rationalized to make them easier to find.

All of those forces play out their roles on an enlarged map, one that now encompasses all of the British Isles. There is ample “sea room” west of Ireland, and the French coast is complete southward past Lorient so that all of Brittany is present. The Faroe Islands are present on the northern edge, and as in the previous edition all of the Baltic Sea is included.

All of the old version’s historical scenarios have been revised, and of course the new pieces and bigger map require new scenarios so there are over a dozen additional ones. The actions of the Dover Patrol, neglected in the old game, are now fully covered as are the bombardments of the Flanders coast (had to do something with those monitors). War plans involving the minor navies now present have scenarios, so that Norway can fight Sweden. The famously insane “Baltic Project” of the British Admiralty, to force a fleet through Danish waters to land troops on Germany’s north coast, is also present.

But the game’s reason for existence is the clash of dreadnoughts known as Jutland. The biggest scenario in Great War at Sea, we also break it down into smaller battle scenarios to study stages of the event. And we also have the Lowestoft Raid, Dogger Bank, Moon Sound and more.

This much larger map will also make possible future book supplements covering topics like American plans to take a war with Britain to the home islands (something we once proposed for the Classic Wargame line as “War Plan Emerald”) or British and French preparations for naval conflict in 1898 or 1904. As the series’ true “core module,” the game will be important for many future supplements.

Click here to order Great War at Sea: Jutland!