Rime of the Ancient Grog: The Chase of the Bismarck

That is not dead which can eternal lie and after strange aeons even grog shit may die - Definitely H.P. Lovecraft

Sunday, May 18th.

Chandler, Arizona. Smash cut to the interior of a board game store/cafe. In the center of the dining room is a long, thin-ish table that can seat twelve. This is the scene of the crime.

That crime? Grognard bullshit.

What's a grognard? It's someone who plays fiddly wargames that only truly masochistic individuals would call fun. My people in other words. It's a reference to Napoleon's soldiers, but if you've ever known someone who talks about how much better Dungeons and Dragons was in the 80s think of them. We're not all toxic or annoying, I promise.

Mostly.

Anyways, this is the scene of a crime of high wargaming, it's going to be where I, with a local friend, play The Chase of the Bismarck: Operation Rheinübung 1941 by VUCA Simulations. This fucking game. We sit down around 11:15, and I start explaining the game. This doesn't take that long, maybe 30 minutes - the game is very procedural which makes it easy to explain, if slightly laborious to go over. We start playing. And for the next 5 hours we dance around the North Atlantic. I'm playing the Germans and my goal is to sail the Bismarck out to the middle of the Atlantic ocean and start preying upon merchant ships.

The Bismarck is a big, fuckoff sized batteship and is an absolute beast but, and this is only the first issue I have with this game, it's one of four, yes four, warships the Germans get. This board is HUGE for the amount of ships you get. As the German player you're going to be constantly rolling on tables to see which random bad bullshit happens to your ships, and trying to desperately sneak past the Allied player, which might be cool if it didn't take so long. The Allied player in contrast to the German player's four ships gets something like fifteen, still a low number for the amount of space on the board but more reasonable than four.

So the Germans start off in Norway, and need to get to the mid Atlantic, the Allied player starts off arrayed between Iceland and Scotland as well as spread along the European coastline. I make the decision to, instead of trying to slip directly past the Allied fleet hook around the top of Iceland and sneak by them. This works, beautifully. When my opponent finally found me (from a bullshit random die roll...) I was far away from them and on the far side of Iceland - but this meant I spent so many turns doing nothing fun... just slowly moving the Bismarck to its final destination - the Allied shipping lanes.

Something important to know about how this game works is the Germans are almost assuredly going to lose, if you look into what happened to the Bismarck historically this makes sense. Also the obligatory thing needs to be said: Fuck Nazis. So I'm not annoyed by that, it's historical and bad guys losing always makes me happy, but when you have lopsided games like this a way to balance them, and clearly what was intended here, is to have both players play both sides and sum up their point totals to figure out who "actually won". In this game the way it works is: If the Bismarck is sunk the Germans lose. If the Bismarck goes to port, depending on which port, they get negative victory points. If you play out the FORTY turns of this game and the Bismarck ends at sea... that's also negative victory points. How do the Germans get victory points? Convoy hunting in the shipping lanes! which after 14 turns of game and 4+ hours we still hadn't gotten to. And they require a roll of a 0 on a d10, and the a 0,1, or 2 on that same d10. That's a 3% chance to find a convoy and get VPs. This fucking game.

If I had to put into a short list my problems with this game it's this:

• Length

• Size

• Randomness

• Rulebook

Length: It's supposed to be a two to four hour game. I think four to six is more reasonable, even when many turns don't have anything to do: The Allied player just has so many pieces to move. I haven't even covered the fact that there are planes to move and makers to place in their flight paths and how you need to call out search hexes to see if you've found a ship there.

Size: It needs a 6 foot x 3 foot dining table and will take up absolutely all of it. This thing is a friggin monster.

Randomness: so many un, or barely, modified d10 rolls. This is a very old school design because it's a minimally modified remake of a '70s wargame and this is full of standard design choices from that era... like the die rolls.

Rulebook: VUCA just isn't great at making solid rulebooks, they look nice, but are missing rules, have large pieces of errata, misspellings. They're not the worst but for a premium product this is infuriating. And for a game that's been out for FIFTY YEARS it shouldn't be this rough, even with redevelopment and redesign happening.

These complaints are me, long windedly, saying that this is an old school wargame with the normal foibles and irritations that go along with it. Would I recommend this game? No. I've been telling people what I think by saying "I can confirm there is in fact a game in the box." Which is a low bar to clear but a shocking amount of games don't manage even that, especially old war games.

Will I play it again? Probably. If I can find a victim partner to play it.