High Seas Fleet:
Edition to Edition
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
February 2023

When we switched to our die-cut and silky-smooth playing pieces a few years back, one of other first products to receive them was Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet. That showed us something else about the new pieces: our supplier obtains far sharper reproduction quality than any printer we’d used before.

And so when it came time to reprint the pieces for High Seas Fleet, I decided to replace the artwork – what we had just wasn’t good enough. That meant re-drawing every ship (though some of the drawings will appear in other books and games, so we’ll get some extra use out of them). I like the results very much; these games deserve beautiful artwork, so we try to add enjoyment in the pieces themselves.

We’re also bringing back Great War at Sea: Cruiser Warfare in a new edition, with completely new ship artwork, and some of the ships overlap. I decided that these only needed to appear once between them, which opened a dozen spaces for new stuff.

High Seas Fleet is intended as a historical study, looking at the question of German commitment to the so-called dreadnought race during the years before the First World War. While the existence of such an arms race is a staple of a number of popular histories of the period, the facts simply don’t bear this out: if the Germans had truly been interested in such a competition, they would have built more ships.

In High Seas Fleet we looked into the details of the German naval shipbuilding program, and the struggle for funding waged with the Imperial German Army. In a true naval arms race, Germany would have built many more dreadnought battleships, and certainly had the financial and industrial capacity to do so, up until 1912 when the view took hold that a land war in Europe within the next two years had become inevitable.

Those additional ships for the High Seas Fleet are the basis of the book, High Seas Fleet. The Germans receive extra ships to bring all of their existing classes to five ships, and new classes of ships for the fiscal years in which they did not lay down a new class (using the actual designs that would have been requested, had the Imperial Navy built ships in that year).

For the third edition of High Seas Fleet, we use those dozen open slots for some brand-new ships. Germany laid down no new armored cruisers in 1905 and 1906, so we fill that void with the big, heavily-armed cruiser proposed by none other than Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1903 as an alternative to what became Germany’s last armored cruiser, SMS Blücher. This ship carried four 280mm and eight 210mm guns, compared to Blücher’s uniform armament of a dozen 210mm guns.

The next alternative design is that presented for the first German battle cruiser, von der Tann, with two twin and four single turrets for 280mm guns instead of the four twin turrets with which she was built. In game terms she’s no different from von der Tann, but she looks cool.

The final German addition is another battle cruiser, the alternative design offered for Seydlitz with all of her armament along the centerline. She fills the 1910 gap in German battle cruiser construction.

And I added a pair of British ship designs, also, both of them alternatives offered but not chosen by the Admiralty Board. One is the version of the battle cruiser Indomitable with all of her turrets along the centerline, analogous to the centerline-Seydlitz design, seen as too radical because it included super-firing turrets.

Sir Philip Watts, who sketched that ship, also offered up a version of the battle cruiser Lion with five rather than four twin turrets for 13.5-inch guns, which he believed could be achieved with a minimal increase in length and displacement. That would also slow construction, and so his proposal met rejection, but it would have been a viable alternative for the two “Dominion” battle cruisers laid down well after Lion.

Most of the ships presented in High Seas Fleet remain those that fill in the gaps in the German construction pattern. Previous editions added a class of semi-dreadnoughts to be laid down in 1905 (when Germany only started one pre-dreadnought, a straggler from the previous class), and one of small dreadnoughts for 1906 (when no battleships were laid down). There’s an extra class of dreadnoughts for 1912, when Germany also laid down no new dreadnoughts as funding shifted to the Army.

We also included a few additional British ships, since the Royal Navy likely would not have stood completely idle in the face of an actual German threat. But not nearly as many of them, since British shipyards were operating at much closer to their capacity than were their German counterparts. They get the extra dreadnoughts deleted from the 1907 and 1908 programs, the sixth unit of the Queen Elizabeth class, and some battleships considered for purchase from foreign owners (but never acquired, since British shipyards were quietly funding the political agitation to increase Royal Navy orders, not so that money could go to buy existing ships).

With additional ships, we have to add additional scenarios. Between the shorter special rules section (thanks to the new Second Edition rules, with which this new edition of High Seas Fleet is compatible) and the advertising at the end of the book, there’s enough room for an extra chapter, so that’s what we’ve inserted.

High Seas Fleet is the kind of counter-factual history I love to explore in wargame format. It’s not an alternative history – it’s an answer to the question of what a German High Seas Fleet might have looked like had the so-called “dreadnought race” been an actual thing and not a scheme cooked up by the Vickers-Armstrong armaments combine to sell more battleships. Had those claims been real, the fleet presented in our book is the one they would have faced across the North Sea during the First World War. And a German fleet able to match the British ship-for-ship makes for a very different naval campaign.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He misses his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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