"War at Sea" -- A Love Letter, Albeit a Faded One

As I write this, I am sick in love with both my kriegsspiel dice (see below), and Battlefield 1.  The latter, a glorious ode to organized violence and the Great War, has encamped in my head space like no other shooter since Doom.  Among its many enchantments, Allied medics are depicted as Indian troops.  Given my affection for "Gunga Din", this is quite a heady thing.

Earlier this week, though, HL and I spent quality time with a very old friend that I did not realize was so dearly missed -- Avalon Hill's War at Sea.

I don't think I've ever owned the game before; not in all these years.  I've played the devil out of it, though.  It may, indeed, be the very first war game I ever played.  The first war game I ever bought, which I've documented several times elsewhere, was Starship Troopers, purchased from a Milwaukee Gimbel's (were there non-Milwaukee Gimbel's?)  I was ten at the time, though, and could never quite get my head around the rules.  Only a few years later, my best friend and I had at War at Sea and something about war gaming clicked.  I can't honestly say who owned that copy of the game.  I should probably ask.  All that to the side, I was wandering around Half-Price Books with a 50%-off coupon in my hand and this above-photographed copy of the game was on offer.  I checked it for contents -- as one absolutely must when purchasing from that often incautious purveyor of used games -- and brought it home.

The first thing that struck me was how small the board is.  I don't know this to be so, but it reads like someone at AH challenged the designer to build a game on half a game board; or at least a single Squad Leader/Panzer Blitz-sized board.

The second is how cluttered the game can become as a result of the board's size.  The side-charts and org tables that we're so used to seeing in games these days aren't there and there's not even the off-map "battle board" for carrying out combats that would today be obligatory.  One thing that I cannot decide if it be genius or madness is the placement of the POC (victory) track smack in the middle of Europe and at a 45-degree angle.

The third is that the game remains, as advertised in its rules, simple.  There's really only three pages of rules -- though done up in a tiny print that is also, damnably, BLUE.  The combat sequence is, of course, where the game got its nom de voyage, Dice at Sea, and the game can come down to a series of horrific rolls, but the sequence of ASW, U-boat, airstrikes, and surface combat remains refreshingly simple and easy to memorize.

This isn't a review, though.  It's a mash note, one I'm glad to write.  The stories the designers were trying to tell in this game are clearer to me now as I better understand the battle for the North Atlantic.  I get, for example, why the Allies want to smuggle those convoys across the North Sea and to the Soviet Union.  I now understand why the British -- and the Germans -- have to choose between defending the North Atlantic and the Med and why the Germans have to keep a tight grip on the Med or risk losing the Spaghetti Fleet.  I enjoy the mechanic under which both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. aren't necessarily willing to sail in defense of the Allied cause and, in the case of the former, can force the British to defend the Baltic lest the Germans sail a single ship that way.  And, knowing what I do about the big girl, I loved the look on HL's face when he first saw the Bismark take steam on turn two and make a beeline for his shipping.  I figured it would distract him, but I didn't expect him to deploy the better part of half his fleet to bring her down.  In the event, he was irate to do 9 points of damage (10 required) only to have me ship her back to Germany for repairs.  Imagine his joy, then, when, during the airstrike phase, he rolled two 6s on three dice and sent her to the bottom with 10 points of damage.

Of course it's not Seekrieg.  It's not close to the verisimilitude of 1805.  It was, however, an evening of great fun, die rolling, and exploration; one that made me want to play again very, very soon.

This round went reasonably well.  Later on, not so much.

Oh, and, to make the record clear, HL cleaned my clock.  I did quite well in the early going, pantsing him rather badly in the Med.  He rallied, though, and, by turn six, just about ever ship I had worth a tinker's cuss was populating the bottom of the sea.