This is a quick game based on the Fletcher Pratt system for two to four people to play at lunch, in a study hall, or any other place where it would be inconvenient to set up ship models. My friends and I invented it back in high school, to play in school. All that is required is paper , pencils, carbon paper, and an agreement on the sizes and types of ships to be used.
First, establish standard sizes for your classes of ships, and standard armament and point values for each. For example, you could have Battleships mounting 6 guns in 3-twin-turrets, Cruisers mounting 4 guns in 2 twin-turrets, and Destroyers carrying 2 guns in single mountings fore and aft. The BB's could be one inch long, the cruiser 3/4" and the DD's 1/2". We drew rather thick-bodied ships to make hits easier. The only other detail needing to be sketched in is a cursory T-shaped bridge and superstructure, and even that can be omitted if you wish. The BBs could be worth 16 points, cruisers 8 and DDs 4. Each shell hit does one point's damage. Each cruiser and DD carries 4 torpedoes, each of which does 4 points of damage if hitting amidships, or 2 points if hitting a bow or stern. Unlike the Pratt system, there is no relationship between survival points and firepower. A ship continues to fire all of its weapons unless there is a direct hit on a turret. Said "turret-popping" knocks out all guns in the turret. A 50% loss in point value does cut the ship's speed in half.
You then make knot-metres out of strips of heavy paper or cardboard, preferably using a metric system. You want a large enough scale so that all ships will be able to move at least one ship length each turn, but not so large that ships run off the paper. Arbitrarily deciding that battleships moved at 24 knots, cruisers at 28 and destroyers at 32, you could nave each centimetre equal 4 knots. Thus, a damaged BB moving at half-speed can clear its last position on its next move. I would suggest the above as the minimum speeds you would want to use. Slightly faster speeds would allow more room for surprise and manoeuvre.
The mechanics of play are as follows: You want to use at least 8 1/2 x 11 paper. This is the largest size which you can easily carry around in a notebook. Each player draws in his fleet on his side of the paper, without the other player being able to see his placement. All ships on the same paper are assumed to be within range. The first player picks up his pencil and places it behind his first ship (or over the bridge, if you draw in the bridge), aims at the enemy ship he is going to fire at, and shuts his eyes. He then moves his pencil forward until he thinks he has gone past the enemy ship, and then starts making dots on the page backwards from that point, in the Pratt manner. Each dot normally represents the hit or splash of a single shell.
However, the player could declare each dot to represent two shells before he opens his eyes, if he felt very confident of his position, The dots can be any distance apart. Each ship's entire broadside must be fired each turn. You cannot fire half your guns in the hope of sinking a ship and using the rest of your firepower elsewhere. The first player fires from all of his ships. Then the second player fires. Players alternate in going first.
Those dots which fall inside the ship's outline, or on the line on the far side, count as hits. A dot touching the near line is considered a near-miss, as in the Pratt system. A dot hitting inside a turret disables it permanently. As an optional rule, you can have a dot touching a turret line at any point jamming the turret for the next 2 turns. (You can get more sophisticated about requiring a maximum range beyond which cruiser or DD shells do not penetrate turrets, but I am just giving the basic game here).
Obviously, the key to fair play is honesty. If a player cheats and peeks, his shooting accuracy will improve. This is why there should be at least 3 people present, so the third can act as referee. You can also play the game Solitaire, and like any other such game, there is no fun if you cheat.
Torpedoes are laid after all firing is done, and obviously can be done only by ships which have not been sunk. Using a straight-edge like a plastic card (preferably not a marked ruler), the player draws short heavy lines about an eighth of an inch long off of his bow. Torpedoes are always fired from the point of the bow unless submarines are used. Draw one line for each torpedo fired, aimed in the direction of the enemy. Torpedoes are moved by the referee after all ships have moved. If the torpedo line intersects a ship, friendly or enemy, a hit is made. This is virtually identical to the Pratt rules. We arbitrarily gave our torpedoes a speed of 50 knots, and a running time of 3 turns. After all ships have moved, the referee should draw straight lines from the starting points from.the starting points for the torpedo tracks. We found most hits were made on the first move, and they usually ran off the paper on or after the second turn, but sometimes there were surprises when someone forgot they were there.
As each ship fires, the hit results are recorded in boxes. Prepare a box score for each ship. This should consist of the name BB1, BB2 etc., and a line of boxes. Put an 'X' in a box every time the ship is hit. Draw a heavy line at the halfway point in the line of boxes. When half of the boxes are filled, the ship goes to half-speed. When hit by a torpedo, fill in either 2 or 4 boxes with 'T's. When all boxes are filled, the ship is sunk. However, since both sides are supposed to be firing simultaneously, a ship which is sunk on a certain turn jets to fire its guns before sinking.
At the end of all firing and torpedo laying, all ships are moved, using the knot metres, No ship can make more than a 90 turn on any one move. A ship cannot stand still if it was going full speed on the previous move. It must go to half-speed on one turn, and may stop on the next. It maythen move either forwards or backwards, but if going backwards this can only be at half the speed it could make forwards. If standing still, a ship can only move at half-speed on the next turn. (Such manoeuverings may be necessary to dodge torpedoes or to engage in or avoid ramming).
Obviously, there can be no real secrecy in moving, except for the initial placement. (Initial placements could be drawn on separate sheets, which are then taped together). If one player moves all of his ships first, the first move must alternate between players each turn. Alternately, half of each side's units could be moved at a time on each turn. Also, players might want to let a crippled ship move first if the other player was planning to try to ram. We always ran a dotted or dashed line from the old position of a ship to its new position to keep track of which ship was which. Then, if there is any question of a ship's identity, you can trace it back to its starting position, which should have its designation shown next to it. This also allows you to review the battle clearly when it is over. We also used to have flag staffs to identify flagships, and sometimes the secondin-command. (You could invent a confusion rule if the flagship is sunk). If a ship is sunk, draw a couple of dashes and a Prussian or Maltese cross to indicate the sinking.
After about three turns, the original sheet of paper is pretty well used up. Insert a piece of carbon paper, and trace the last position of each ship on a new sheet. If you have a running battle, as is often the case, you will want to place the ships on the new sheet in a different position fromwhere they are on the old sheet. If all ships are going in the same direction, put them at the top of the second page, so nobody runs off the page too soon. With a little common sense, you can get at least 3 moves on each page. A battle will usually run anywhere from 6 to 9 moves. Sometimes, a winning player will permit the loser to run off the board and escape with what is left of his fleet. The runner is always the loser. A ship may run off the board and later re-enter the battle, but this should be done only under unusual circumstances and under the watchful eye of the referee to make sure that it moves at the proper speed.
To play a standard game (for comparison purposes), each battle would have to consist of the same number of ships on each side. We had a 4-man league, with a full schedule consisting of each person playing each of the others twice, for a total of six games. We used the Hockey league system of scoring: two points for a victory and one for a tic (a tie usually being mutual annihilation). We established a standard of something like two battleships, two cruisers, and 4 destroyers per side for our league games. The battles were brief and bloody, with one side usually getting wiped out in 6 to 8 turns.
You could use submarines, but I won't go into the technical rules here. We even tried using a small aircraft carrier, but it was too much to try to keep track of a dozen planes. I recommend that you start off with a small battle, say one BB and twQ cruisers per side. Or, for variety, the Adm. Graf Spee on one side and three Writish cruisers on the other. Add more units after you get familiar with the system.
The great thing about this game is that you can play it almost anywhere where you have a flat desk or table. We even played in places like the school library, silently passing the papers across to each other. The one thing we found to affect the battles was the superior sense of distance which was possessed by one player who was training to be a professional artist. Since he was the least familiar with the rest of the naval wargames rules, this was not an overwhelming advantage, but you might want to add a handicap if a player is a professional artist or otherwise has a sixth sense about distance.
To make the battles run faster, we sometimes used "flying wedge" formations instead of conventional battle lines, to bring the fleets together faster. This resulted in almost instant mayhem. We also had ramming rules, the exact specifics of which I forget. I think we assumed that these were 1890's warships with ram bows, and a direct ram amidships sank a ship of the same class or smaller, but I forget whether or how much damage this would do to the rammer. (Two of the people who get BUSHWACKER were participants in these paper ship battles, and maybe one of them will fill me in on this).
You can carry the game on step further and actually hav~e the players estimate the ranges of the ships in quarter-inches, and have the referee plot out the shell falls, exactly as it is done in Pratt. This is why your knot metres should be in metric. (In Fletcher Pratt's game, the players have to have knot metres in their hands to move their ships, so knots are calculated in metric and ranges in inches to prevent cheating). If you fire by this method, it is necessary to draw a funnel on each ship, since the shell splashes are usually calculated from one ship's bow across the first funnel of the other. Of course, if you are going to go to that stage, you might consider getting some little 1:3000 models and making a real battle out of it. The basic rules of this paper and pencil game is for quickies.
(Re-printed by kind permission of Fred C. Davis, from his magazine "BUSHWACKER")
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© Copyright 1975 by Donald Featherstone.
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