Somewhere in North Sea : 1/3000 Naval Battles

Regular followers with have spotted I picked up a few secondhand Dreadnoughts over the last few months and painted them up. After searching for some suitable rules I picked up a copy of “When Dreadnoughts rules the Seas” by Brian DeWitt and available through Amazon via Little Wars TV. The rules are only 4 pages and you can download ship cards and the booklets comes with background info and several scenarios.

Anyway having played a number of more traditional battles we thought we would give these a run out for fun, see if we like the rules etc….

Pretty easy terrain to setup this is my ‘sea’ cloth for our planned Cruel seas game in the spring. The rules come with some turning templates and the ship cards can be downloaded and printed off. There is as to be expected some record keeping, and we soon discovered we could simplify the speed into five steps rather than a complete sliding scale which is hard to keep track of.

Our initial battle sets out, one dreadnought, a light cruiser and a Destroyer squadron each side. The destroyers can deploy smoke so why not !

After some manoeuvring and with both the Cruisers and destroyers sent to the bottom of the sea the Dreadnought pound it out.

Despite being hit and damaged the Derfflinger scores a critical hit on the Queen Mary with their poor fire control the crew are unable to put it out and she explodes !💥💥💥 unexpected but I believe this is exactly what happened historically. We had lunch and pondered a bigger battle in the afternoon.

The added complexity of Mist now drifting across the North Sea, two pretty equal fleets now faced off against each other. We were probably too ambitious and should have limited the number of ships to about six ! Lesson learnt.

Anyway the two fleets steam towards each other

The Germans attempt to cover their attack with smoke but a couple of the British Battleships break through hunting the German fleet.

As I guess is probably the way of these things both fleets swing around attempting to get the advantage and use the mist and smoke to hide any attack. The British got the better if the encounter and although the British had taken quite a pounding by the end the Germans had lost two Battleships and were forced to flee back to port.

A fun day gaming and nice to try out the ships. The rules worked well and are pretty quick to pick up, we had a couple of questions on things which weren’t quite clear (like the number of Torpedos each ship carries) but we sorted these out as we went along. We were over ambitious with the number of ships in the afternoon and would have been better with a smaller but focussed scenario. When we play it again (sometime) we will focus down a little. But as a change it was quite fun and I have always wanted to give this scale of Naval gaming a try out. Huge benefit is the storage space and the speed a battle can be set up…..

Thanks for checking by…….back to AWI and WW2 in the next few days 

Matt ❤️