Broadside Empires of Steel - Stern Chase!

 

Last night the Wollongong Wargamers practised our Broadside game we intend to lay on at the IPMS Show.

Caesar picked the Broadside mission most likely to reflect the theme of the battle and allow for maximum public participation:

Its been pointed out that its not a precise match to the fleet dispositions for the battle except in the widest sense that the battle was essentially a stern chase: the German High Seas Fleet was outnumbered and outgunned and was sensibly attempting to escape!

Personally I also learnt how rusty I am with these rules. Even such elegant and succinct rules as Broadside need regular practice to become adept with!

By Broadside standards this was also a very large game - its designed to play with only a handful of capital ships and attendant escorts per side. However for a show we will have all day to play and are going for maximum impact.

The eponymous Bank was purely for show - we find that naval games attract more attention from the public if they have some sort of land modelled.

The pursuit force: lots of torpedo carriers!

Then the interceptors who would come on at the opposite corners at some stage...here, three of the 'Splendid Cats'!

The German team were advised to allocate at least part of their force to sacrifice themselves by turning and delaying the pursuit, but they decided to make it a straight forward stern chase, making 'More Speed' to get home for tea and medals...

So the chase was on!

We quickly ran out of 'More Speed' order cards!

Somehow the pursuers managed to close to torpedo range...

To put no less than seven fish into Blucher, which sank almost as fast as her historical counterpart.

The pursuers then focussed on Seydlitz - but she would be a much tougher nut to crack, on account of being an actual Battlecruiser...

The plot got more complicated when the British reinforcements started to arrive...

With their mighty 13.5 inch guns!

These heavy shells soon found the range to Derfflinger...

However, the pounding of Seydlitz continued, such that a mere single torpedo hit was sufficient to also send her to Davy Jones...At that bombshell, with four moves completed, we called it a day. The Royal Navy team had inflicted one more capital ship loss than occurred historically!

We concluded that we need to do some serious tweaking to the scenario if we want it to be anything other than a fairly bland stern chase...