Der Tag 1916

 Jim picked up a copy of "Der Tag 1916", a solo game covering naval operations in the North Sea in WW1. As we often end up being able to play solo games as a team effort, we thought we'd give it a go as a group on one of our evening remote sessions.

The game map, essentially three sea areas and a number of key coastal locations. Rather like a very cut down version of AHGCs 'War at Sea'. In the original game, the player commands the Grand Fleet defending Britain against a programmed opponent. 

The cast of thousands, and an excuse to wear our dodgy collection of sailor hats. I was Vice Admiral Bacon, commander of the Dover Patrol, John was Jellicoe, Micheal was Beattie with the BC Fleet and Tim was Jerram commanding 2nd Battle Squadron with its new Super Dreadnoughts (Warspite etc).

Mark was the German High Seas fleet, which in the standard game generates one 'operation' per game season - there being four seasons in 1916. The aim was to gain more points than the Germans - mainly for sinking enemy ships, but also avoiding the Germans conducting conducting successful operations. 

The game comes with counters for every major ship deployed by both sides, from Armoured Cruisers up. As we were playing remotely, we just kept track of which ships were allocated to each fleet. There are still an awful lot of them!

My chaps were certainly the runt of the bunch - I had three elderly Armoured Cruisers, seven Pre-Dreadnought Battleships and one Dreadnought (HMS Dreadnought herself in fact).

Jellico had to deploy the fleet to the various bases, the Germans mounted an operation, and then the various bases could respond. Ships stationed in the area could intercept immediately, those from adjacent areas took three combat rounds to arrive, just two rounds if they were purely Battlecruisers.

To start with we went with the standard deployment.

Given the potential for enormous numbers of ships fighting, combat was very pared down - each ship rolled a single D6, combat results were generated for each class, generally expressed as hits, critical hits (rare) and saves. Saves cancelled out enemy hits, but not criticals. Hits were apportioned and then resolved on the damage table, but generally any sort of hit was bad, the targets either being sunk or sufficiently damaged to be out of action for future combat rounds. In an interesting twist each side had different combat and damage tables.

Ships sunk scored points, ACs were only worth 1 whereas modern BB+ super dreadnoughts were worth 5, as were Battlecruisers.... 

As we were just recording things on bits of paper, there aren't any 'in game' photos really. We got a complete session in on Tuesday. The weather was generally reasonable so we didn't miss any interceptions. The general run of operations was as follows:

Spring 1916: German raid on Dover, 47 civilians killed. Dover Patrol intercepted and sank a German Battlecruiser for no loss(!).

Summer 1916: BCs transferred to Rosyth. German raid on Norway, covered by High Seas Fleet. Intercepted by Grand Fleet from Scapa Flow and a major action ensued. Appalling dice throwing made this a fairly indecisive action and only a few ships were lost on each side. The British BCs were not ordered to intervene. 

Autumn 1916: The Germans returned to Dover with a 'ruse' - a hospital ship covered by the High Seas Fleet. What a rotten German trick. The Dover Patrol sallied forth and Beattie was despatched south. Unsurprisingly, the Dover Patrol was blown out of the water and lost two Armoured Cruisers and three pre-Dreadnoughts while Beattie lost another BC, however we managed to also sink two more German BCs.

We called it a night at that point. 

Bizarrely when totting up the points at the end, the British had won! Although the German had sunk a lot of our ships (I can't recall the exact totals being mainly focussed on my fleet) a lot of it was low point rubbish, whereas we'd managed to eliminate quite a few high value German ships (mainly the BCs).

On Wednesday we gave it another go in the light of experience. Jellicoe send an additional seven Armoured Cruisers to the Dover Patrol and concentrated the entire BC force at Rosyth ready to intervene in any of the three sectors.

With our forces better distributed we were able to intervene in force anywhere in the North Sea fairly quickly. 

Sadly it turned out that the Germans had also learned from the previous day, and repeatedly broke off the action as soon as there was the slightest chance they might be outnumbered (generally as soon as the Grand Fleet hove into view).  In turn this meant that in the series of raids they mounted, they usually had force superiority in the opening rounds, and coupled with their better ships, the rate of attrition was very much in their favour. 

The Dover Patrol had one moment of glory when it saw off the High Seas Fleet at terrible cost, but managed to sink not just a German Battle cruiser, but a Super Dreadnought as well! 

It was a brief respite from the misery though, and in adding up the points at the end, it was a complete wipe out by the Germans. Hah! Well, they may have "won", but we still had an intact fleet, so we would win the war. Take that Fritz. 

That was lots of fun, and Mark did admit that in the second game he had been incredibly lucky with his force allocation dice for the Germans. The High Seas Fleet sorted every single turn (a 1:32 chance) hence their initial crushing superiority in every engagement. It was a good way to manouvre the vast WW1 battle fleets in a short space of time though, and the game had a very strategic feel to it. Good stuff.