Der Tag 1916 revisited

 We fancied another trip to the North Sea in 1916, so Jim put on 'Der Tag 1916' again. This featured on the blog a few months ago, but briefly it is a solo game about Jutland, although we played it as teams. 

The campaign is regulated on this abstract map of the North Sea over four seasons/turns which span 1916. As it features every single battleship and armoured cruiser, combat is rather abstracted to cope with the sheer number of potential ships involved.

The British allocate their ships between Dover, Rosyth and Scapa. The Germans then draw an operations card (which can be anything from a raid to The Big One) and the British try to stop them. VPS are scored for sinking enemy ships, and the Germans get them for successful ops too. 

Once again an array of dodgy hats was on display. I was Admiral Bacon again (Dover Patrol), Tim was Beatty, Mark Jellicoe and Russell was Jerram. John played the role of Scheer and had made a special Imperial Navy badge for his naval officers hat. Very impressive.

The spreadsheet for keeping track of the ship locations and statuses. There are an awful lot of them! The fleet locations are important because each port has a minimum and maximum berthing number, and each port has a greater or lesser chance of getting to the various sea areas. If any combat occurs, it is over three rounds and ships further away may only arrive on turn 2 or later, if at all. BCs and ACS tend to get their quicker, and bad weather can foul up all plans.

In the event, the weather was generally lousy, which favoured the Germans.

Spring 1916 saw a raid on Scarborough in good weather, the BCs sortied and there was a brief battle with the Germans which resulted in no losses on either side, although both had some damaged ships. The German broke off at that point. 

Summer 1916 had a raid on Harwich in bad weather. The Dover Patrol managed to intercept and in a brief engagement we sank the Margraf (a German BB+), but lost HMS Hibernia in the process. As the latter was a clunky pre-dreadnought, that was a good exchange. The Germans broke off before the fleet from Rosyth could intervene.

Autumn 1916 saw no action in bad weather and the Germans remained in port and build up morale (VPs).

Winter 1916 was also down as no action in bad weather,but Scheer always has the option to override and he declared Der Tag, so a fleet action was fought in the central zone of the North Sea. Beatty arrived on the scene first and was duly pummelled by the massed High Seas Fleet, losing two BCs and two BB+ (Indefatigable, Queen Mary, Malaya and Valiant). 

The Grand Fleet arrived on the scene in the third phase (due to bad weather) and a single huge round of combat was fought between the massed battleships. When the smoke cleared, no further ships had been sunk! The Germans were well ahead on points at that point, but out of time and had to break off and head for Germany with the Grand Fleet undefeated.

Overall it was another German campaign win on points.

That is a really fun game and we managed to rattle through the whole thing fairly quickly now we know what we are doing. I am sure there is an optimum strategy for the British, but we haven't figured it out yet. So much is down to vagaries of the German action cards, but it is very atmospheric and works well for team play.