Jeff Wiltrout and I drove to Bob and Cleo Liebl’s house, and discovered that, including we two, there were 9 guys at table-side, which measured 12 feet by 6 feet. This was a scenario using Victor O Schmidt’s naval rules for the Victorian era, titled IF YOU BUILD IT, IT WILL SINK! (for shorthand, I’ll refer to the rules as IFY). The Schmidt rules booklet encompasses some 20 pages, but only 4 of them are actually devoted to the rules (move, fire, morale, etc) themselves. The remainder is an entertaining and talky presentation of Otto’s thoughts on naval warfare in the Victorian period, sometime around 1880. Bob and Cleo had ginned up the two sides… basically German versus British… wherein the British had 22 ships, while we Germans had 19 ships. Of the British fleet, 5 of them appeared to be battleships, and I think we Germans had a like number of the big guys. The British fleet sailed across the table, with one of their objectives (aside from destroying the enemy) being to capture a new type of German vessel… a monitor-type of ironclad. This ironclad was circular in shape and possessed two guns, and could speed along up to 4 inches per movement phase. The problem was that if the craft moved faster than 2 inches per turn, it would “spin” like a flying saucer… and when you looked on the “spin” chart, you found out the ship took off… it dashed all over the place, sometimes at right angles to the direction in which you wanted to go. In my small German squadron, I had command of two of these monitors, plus one battleship. Looking at the parameters of the monitors, one wondered why in the world the Brits wanted to capture one… they looked like losers to me. But rules is rules, I allus sez. In fact, my battleship looked like a loser, too. During the firing phase, the firing ship, no matter what size it was, tossed a number of 6-sided dice, looking to register a strike with 6’s. If a strike was scored, the target ship then tossed a savings die for each 6… another 6-sider… looking to toss a number equal to, or under, its armor value. My battleship had an armor value of 2… I looked for a 1 or 2 to deflect a strike… but with this pukey armor value, just about every strike on my battleship transformed itself into a direct hit and knocked off boxes. I noted that a couple of the British battleships were gifted with proper armor… their savings throws had to be under a 5 or 6 to ward off a strike. Which meant that the larger British ships were fairly difficult to hit. And why my ship was termed a ‘battleship’ was a question I couldn’t answer. I will admit that my monitors were better armored… an armor value of grade 4, so that a toss of 1,2,3 or 4 would ward off a strike. But here’s the sad part… each of my monitors had only 4 “bullets”… they could fire 4 times, and then they were out of ammunition. At least my battleship had an ammo supply of 12, 12 bullets, transforming it into almost-worthy opponent. The sequence of the game called for Side-A-move/Side-B-fire. And each turn, the initiative was diced for. Sometimes it was critical to go first, other times, second. The fire phases were all concerned with the throw of 6-sided dice. For some reason, perhaps to beef up his charts, Otto tossed in 20-sided dice for 6 special situations. These involved the effect of torpedos and ramming and critical hits and collisions, etc. Torpedo Torpedos took over the last half of the game. When firing its guns, a ship had to toss a 6-sider, looking for 6’s... pretty hard to do. But sending off a torpedo involved a wee bit more fun. There were a lot of little motor-torpedo boats on each side, zipping around the ocean surface (some 20 inches per turn) and each of these had anywhere from 3 to 6 torpedos to let loose. Each time a torpedo was launched, a toss of a 6-sider for a 1,2 or 3 (50% chance of good luck) indicated the torpedo was on its way. If a 4,5 or 6 was thrown, another chart was referred to… this one used a 20-sider… and half of the results were bad… including the torpedo blowing up immediately upon launch, damaging the ship. A torpedo, once launched, traveled 12 inches per turn in a straight line, and if they hit nothing after going 36 inches (3 turns), they sank to the bottom. The 12 inch distance was done during the firing side’s movement phase, and so the proper method of launching a torpedo was: a Get to within 12 inches of your target, and hope for a good launch b Then, on the next turn, hope to win the initiative, for your torpedos immediately zipped forward another 12 inches and smashed into the target ship. If you didn’t win the initiative, the target ship would move first and easily dance out of the way. There were also provisions for ramming. And unfortunately, the game turned into an ancient sea battle, with everyone trying to ram the nearest enemy ship. This might have occurred because the ships were running out of ammunition, or the players were not happy with the need to toss a 6 to hit a target during gunnery. In any case, it just didn’t look like a naval battle of the Victorian era. Jeff Wiltrout, a British commander, took a cruiser, and rammed into one of my monitors… his intent was to capture this modern marvel, board it, and take it home to Portsmouth for the British engineers to examine. We referred to the ramming chart, Jeff tossed 20-sider, and discovered that his ramming attempt was not successful… his ship bounced off and suffered a loss of 2 hull boxes while my monitor lost 1 box. Jeff didn’t give up… these Brits never do. And a second attempt to ram was successful, and his cruiser ended up alongside my monitor. Now the question was… so what? Our ships were coupled together, the British crew wanted to pour aboard, capture its prize… but where were the rules? Alas! Otto’s text says that capturing an enemy ship has so low a possibility of occurring that the rules don’t cover it. And so, since Jeff’s cruiser crew far outnumbered my own crew, we thought that a toss of a 1,2, 3 or 4 would win the boarding battle. Jeff was successful, and my monitor was his! In the meantime, my other monitor was useless… it ran out of bullets… and my so-called battleship had been beaten down from an initial 9 hull boxes to 1, and one more single hit would sink it. Fortunately, we ended the game before that could happen. Back to PW Review October 2001 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 Wally Simon 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