Plan Gold: Designer's Notes
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2006

I usually design games because of some long-standing interest in the subject, like Battles of 1866, or because gamers want it badly, like Panzer Grenadier: Road to Berlin. I trained as a historian, and that’s always been a much stronger suit in my work than systems design.

Great War at Sea: U.S. Navy Plan Gold arose pretty much by accident. At the Origins game convention in 2004, I was rooting around our display booth looking for something and Liz Fulda, our vice president, was talking to customers. During a lull, she poked me and said at least three different gamers had asked for new games like U.S. Navy Plan Red. What other war plans, she asked, could form the basis of another game like Plan Red?

I told her about Britain’s Matador plan for war with Japan in the early 1920s. She liked that, but what about American war plans? Did they make plans to fight anyone besides the British, Japanese and Germans? The United States, I assured her, has crafted plans to make war on all 152 independent nations of the planet Earth at some point, and probably a few to combat space aliens.

That evening, we had a business dinner with our good friends Guillaume, Chloé, Leo and Cyril from Darwin Project, a French publisher of magazines and games. I had a long and spirited conversation with Cyril Pasteau, editor of Backstab magazine, about the deplorable state of relations between France and the United States. At the time, disgraced Ohio Congressman Bob Ney was making an idiotic stand on “Freedom Fries” in the Capitol cafeteria, while the president’s re-election machinery merrily ridiculed John Kerry for speaking French, the language of cowards. T-shirts proclaiming “F the French” were in vogue. All because the French government suggested that the invasion of Iraq might be a bad idea.

Sister republics, Cyril said, should not act in this way, yet political passions of the moment could drive a breach between even the closest of allies. France came to America’s aid in 1779; the United States had rescued France in 1917 and 1944. On September 12th, 2001, Cyril and millions of Frenchmen had stood ready to fight America’s attackers with true Gallic élan. Nous sommes tout Americains had been no mere slogan. Yet now American politicians spoke of France as an enemy; there probably were war plans in the archives.

Back on the job after the convention, I was working on a supplement for the Panzer Grenadier series called Phantom Armies. One of those projects that never quite got completed, it included a piece about American and German intentions toward Iceland: Plan Indigo for the Americans, Operation Ikarus for the Germans. American marines fighting German mountain troops in the rocky wastes. The American marine brigade sent to Iceland in 1941 had originally been earmarked for an invasion of the French-held islands of the Caribbean, Guadeloupe and Martinique. A little more digging about the Martinique operation revealed that its planning was based on the very rudimentary War Plan Gold, the navy’s plan to fight the French in the Caribbean.

Here I had the basis for the game Liz wanted. We put Plan Gold on the Classic Wargames list late that year and it shot to the top. It went into production in the spring of 2006 and has now started landing on tabletops across the world including France.

Unlike the previous “Plan” games, the Gold war plan provided only a handful of scenarios and much of it had to be inferred. I don’t like to think of these games as “alternate history,” the lazy researcher’s alternative. These are based on the actual plans of the participants, and as such are more of a historical simulation in many respects than wargames based on “actual” events. There is no “Plan Gold universe”; this game takes place in potential situations that war planners foresaw. No plan of any sort, be it personal, political, or military, is truly based on “reality” because the future is unknowable.

Great War at Sea fans like their hardware, and the game has plenty of that. Like all the major powers, France had plans for powerful battleships that were never completed. The Normandie class and Lyons class are included, along with a number of prizes from the First World War. The former Austrian dreadnought Prinz Eugen, transferred to French control in August 1920, was expended as a gunnery target in June 1922. Here we provide her in French colors, as Corse. The French also received the German Thüringen in April 1920 and used her as a target before scrapping her in 1923. Neither ship would have gone to the breakers during a renewed war, and so she’s in the game as well, as Alsace.

In 1914, Greece ordered a Provence-class battleship named Basileus Konstantinos, a ship included in our Dreadnoughts supplement. She had not been formally laid down when the First World War erupted but material had been gathered and the French navy considered completing her as Savoie. But we used that name in the Dreadnoughts book for another ship; in Plan Gold she bears the name Vendée.

The French fleet lacked sufficient cruisers for scouting; we included the 1914 light cruiser design and the 1922 design in Plan Gold. There are also four former German cruisers and one ex-Austrian, all in French colors. These ships did serve France in the 1920s and 1930s. And as we’ve covered elsewhere, the French order of battle includes their unusual combat cruiser design, plus the aircraft carrier Béarn and their projected battle cruisers.

The United States has its own sets of big ships it planned but never completed. There are four of the huge South Dakota class as shown on the game’s cover, two with 16-inch guns and two with 18-inch guns. I became intrigued by the Navy’s multiple plans for new cruisers, and included several variants of the Omaha class: the better-designed four-turret version, the version with 14-inch guns, and the light aircraft carrier design project that became the basis for the World War II Independence-class converted light cruisers.

In the late 1990s we published a game, now out of print, on American plans to contest a German invasion of the Caribbean in the 1920s, called Plan Black. I’d never been really satisfied with the map we included in that game and Brian Knipple pointed out that the map he’d drawn for it had originally been much larger. I don’t recall why we cut it down — I’d forgotten that a larger version even existed — but I suspect the printer we used at the time could not handle the full-sized Caribbean.

The map in Plan Gold allows for a much broader range of scenarios, covering the real American interest in the Caribbean: protecting the Panama Canal. The canal zone is on the map and an important strategic point in several scenarios. For this game, I did away with the printed merchant routes of earlier games in the series. I wanted to be able to use the map for scenarios in a book-with-pieces supplement to revisit Plan Black plus look at Anglo-American war plans in the region. The same routes would not apply to these other conflicts.

Working on Second World War at Sea: Bismarck had also brought home the real reluctance of merchant skippers to follow pre-determined routes very closely. I replaced the printed routes with tables of die roll modifiers: you’re more likely to find freighters in certain areas. In playtesting that method worked out very well, and it also allowed us to vary the mix of locations depending on the scenario parameters.

Plan Gold is a fine package, and a very satisfying accomplishment. Production came out very well, particularly the map printing, and Doug McNair made sure the scenarios are all tense and competitive. But any nation that produces real men like Cyril Pasteau and lovely women like Chloé Sanchez can never be an enemy in my universe.