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Over the holidays, I decided to try some small scale battles solo. I tried out the Battle of the Denmark Strait, the Battle of the River Plate, and a modified final battle of the Bismarck.

Battle of Denmark Strait
Using the King George V and Admiral Hipper to fill in for the Prince of Wales and Prinz Eugen respectively, it seemed like a pretty decent match. Although the Royal Navy had considerably more points, the Hood's tendency to explode evened things out and I ended up with a victory for the Kreigsmarine (the Prince of Wales elected to withdraw after jamming her mounts and receiving a decent amount of damage). Still I felt the battle could have easily gone either way.

Battle of the River Plate
Using an additional HMS Ajax to play the role of the Achilles, this match was much more one-sided. The Graf Spee managed one ineffective salvo at range four before getting jumped on by three cruisers. Losing the initiative didn't help either! After that, the Graf Spee lasted through two turns of gunfire before giving up the ghost. The Royal Navy suffered one damage to two different ships (I was hoping to get lucky and "vital" one of the cruisers). This battle just didn't seem competitive but I realize that real battles rarely are!

Sink the Bismarck!
A crippled Bismarck vs. two healthy Royal Navy battleships didn't sound like a real nail biter so I tried to even the score a bit. The Luftwaffe is often criticized for not having done more to help the Bismarck. So I gave the Axis side two FW 200 Kondors (but they couldn't use the antiship missile). The Bismarck started in the middle without damage and could move. It had to cross the map from long-side to long-side to escape. The Rodney and the King George V each started in a corner on the same long-side as the Bismarck. To help the Royal Navy slow down the Bismarck, I put the Ark Royal off map with two squadrons of Swordfish. Only the Kondors would be allowed to attack the Ark Royal (I found a report of He 111s attacking the Ark Royal but failing to do any damage). Sadly, even after trying to even the odds a bit, the Bismarck was pretty much doomed.


My question to you sea dogs out there: have you created any Battle of the River Plate or Sink the Bismarck scenarios where the Axis actually had any chance of winning?

After writing more than a dozen scenarios for WaS, I've come to the conclusion that the mechanics of the game are not very conducive to scenarios with a lot of depth, which you would need to make say a small battleship duel worthwhile. The rules are calibrated to larger fleet size engagements. I want to try out some other rule sets to see how they handles engagements of this size.

I've played the River Plate and it can be tense. The difficulty in recreating it with W@S is not the rules but the standard map layout, which is too small for this type of maneuver battle. If Graf Spee has plenty of room behind her (as she did historically), then she can try to stand off and pound the Brits from range 4 (as Langsdorff should have done). If the Brits have plenty of room to circle, they can come at Graf Spee from several directions at once and cut off her ability to keep falling back out of range. It comes down to running room and initiative and how well the players use them. Try playing it on the floor with rulers instead of on the table and you'll have a whole different experience.

Steve