For years I have looked for a good theater-level game to generate scenarios for my miniatures games. Then I found the games by Avalanche Press. Their Great War at Sea games are an excellent series for this purpose. Each game covers a theater of operations (Mediterranean WW I, North Sea WW I, Far East 1904-05, Caribbean (US vs. Germany 1920s), Plan Orange, SOPAC (WW II Solomons campaign) and, by the time you read this, 1898 (Spanish-American War). The games all come with counters for a lot of ships, so if you don't have any miniatures you can use the counters for your ships. They even have counters for ships that "never were", such as BC Lexington, BC Rodney (sister to Hood), Canadian BBs (Quebec and Ontario) and even Brazilian BB's (which were built). All of the games use a similar system, modified according to what equipment was available at the time (for instance, SOPAC adds carrier operations). Each game has several phases, at some point having a contact phase. A die is rolled and modified by various factors to see if contact is made. After contact is made you can use CaS/FG&DN instead of the combat rules included in the game. Just use the information on weather, time of day and direction of entry to set up the CaS/FG&DN game. Since there are no provisions for long campaigns, ship repair is covered very lightly, with the only damage control being restoring mobility to ships that are incapable of moving at battles end or aircraft carrier flight decks to operation if disabled. Victory points are awarded for ships damaged and sunk per the game rules. I modify the victory point situation by adjusting the damage received via CaS to the board games' level by dividing the damage points in CaS by the number of hit boxes on each ship in the board game. Gunnery hits are treated the same, if gun damage has occurred during the playing of CaS. If all guns are out then check off all of the hit boxes, otherwise a smaller portion are checked off. I highly recommend these games for anyone interested in generating campaign game scenarios for CaS and FG&DN. Thanks, Ron BT Back to The Naval Sitrep #19 Table of Contents Back to Naval Sitrep List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Larry Bond and Clash of Arms. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com