Much of that lack of energy can be attributed to the bumbling, meddling First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir Winston Churchill. Restrictive rules of engagement made it pretty much impossible for the raider to do much raiding, while the British expended little energy in hunting her down. The game now opens with the start of World War II, with the armored cruiser Deutschland’s rather inept cruise into the North Atlantic. We promised 40, and I could have gone well beyond 45 but finally had to just stop somewhere. And with Bismarck’s Second Edition, I wanted to be sure that the French fleet’s brief operations in the North Atlantic would be represented. Years later, when I owned a wargame publishing company of my own and designed a Bismarck game of my own, I made sure that those American showed up in the game, and did so when they actually appeared (or might have).

I had made the game resemble history at least a little more than it already did. They didn’t look very good, but that wasn’t really the point. There were French ships operating in the North Atlantic, but not at the time of the Bismarck adventure.Īnd so I got out my narrow-point felt-tip markers and my official Avalon Hill blank counters (just as badly die-cut as the game pieces), and I made my own pieces. There were American ships operating in the North Atlantic, but not the ones included in the game. But it showed me that my new game didn’t accurately reflect the history of the North Atlantic campaign. Newer scholarship left Rohwer and Hümmelchen behind long ago, and while I own a copy now I don’t crack it open very often. It appeared in the 1960’s in German and in 1974 in an English translation. It wasn’t exactly enlightening reading, just a timeline of dates listing the movement of ships on those dates. Two of those dusty tomes were the two-volume Chronology of the War at Sea by Jurgen Rohwer and Gerhard Hümmelchen (later editions took away poor Hümmelchen’s byline). The Irondale Public Library in those days occupied a back room of City Hall, right next to the Water Department, with a one-shelf history section. That old Avalon Hill game had Bismarck’s final journey as a scenario, and some variations on it adding (among others) apparently randomly-chosen American and French ships to the game. That makes our own Second World War at Sea: Bismarck a very special project for me, so I probably poured way too much time and energy into it. I think I was 15, and I know I bought it from Homewood Toy&Hobby (which still exists) with the very first check I ever wrote. The very first game I ever bought for myself was an old Avalon Hill title about the last cruise of the battleship Bismarck.

Battlefleet 1939 crack