WW1 Naval - Micro Fleet style

A boardgame without a board - a tactical game with more weight than Avalon Hill’s Jutland 

The components - play sheets, move/damage record charts and counters. The rules are in the cover and are 21 single sided pages long.

Well this is a blast from the past and no mistake! My good friend Mr Fox was having a tidy up of, I believe, his Area 51 1/2, when he came across his copy of the above, along with the Jutland Fleet packs. Having no further use for the same and knowing my interest in the period and old gaming systems, he very kindly passed them on to yours truly.

Published in 1976 by Tabletop Games, the game was part of a series which included Napoleonics, ancients, Colonials, Sci Fi, WW2 naval, Napoleonic naval and I believe Medievals. Contained inside the cover were the rules, playing aids and record pads along with counters to represent the units. There were additional army packs available and for the Napoleonic naval version the fleet packs for Trafalgar. As I recall the WW2 naval version covered the Denmark Straits and the River Plate with an expansion covering Matapan. 

For the WW1 naval edition the base game features ship counters for the Goeben incident, the Falklands, Dogger Bank and the battlecruiser actions from Jutland. The two expansion packs add the remaining ships to the Jutland order of battle. the rules were very much of their time - chart and factor heavy with written moves.

I remember playing many games with this system, including Jutland, with an old friend of mine using his lounge floor. It was great fun but limited as to the variety of ships available - British and German only. I never knew who designed this but I had many a cracking action with it. Would I use it again? Possibly for nostalgic reasons but as an inveterate rules tinkerer I would probably look to, ahem, borrow some of the ideas and put my own spin on it.

I would be really keen to reverse engineer the ship specs just to see how the designer got to where they got to.

My thanks to Mr Fox for passing this on to me - as ever much appreciated!

BTW, if any readers have any of the other editions of this series they no longer need then please let me know - especially the other two naval titles, WW2 and Napoleonic.