Remember the Maine:
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
January 2024

Great War at Sea, like our other game series, is built around one central notion: One Rulebook to Rule Them All. That’s true for the new Second Edition as well; if you know how to play Jutland, you can play Remember the Maine right away. Your gaming time is valuable, and you need to spend it playing games.

Remember the Maine is what we call a “cure” game: everything you need to play is right there in the package, and you only need to supply the dice. Our theme this time is the Spanish-American War, with the naval campaign in the Caribbean taking center stage.

The new United States Navy is built around its battleships, which are very obviously evolved from the riverine/coastal monitors of the Civil War era. While the Americans do field some cruisers, theirs is a rather slow and ponderous force, if powerful.

Spain’s Armada is centered on its (relatively) fast armored cruisers, which give Almirante Pascual Cervera y Topete many options to dance around the Americans and inflict pain at many points. Unless Madrid orders him to hole up in a Cuban port with a narrow entrance, which is exactly what happened.

In 1898, Spain still held a small remnant of her once-great colonial empire: Cuba and Puerto Rico. An abortive attempt to expand those holdings during the 1860’s, with the United States distracted by its own Civil War, had long faded away. Die-hard Spanish nationalists believed that these islands must be held to prevent a national decline; their American counterparts saw Cuba’s conquest and annexation as the first stage of a pivot from Western to Southern expansion. The road to continued Manifest Destiny ran through Havana.

In the actual conflict, Cuba had been the spark for war, when the battleship Maine exploded in Havana’s harbor. The Spanish had nothing to do with it; the cause turned out to be careless ammunition storage on the part of her crew.  But the United States already sought an excuse for war, and the accident provided it. American politicians and especially newspaper publishers made Cuba their objective, and so the island inevitably became the focal point once they had their war.

The Spanish outfitted a fleet and dispatched it to the Caribbean. Their armored cruisers would be perfectly suited to interfering with any American attempts to convoy troops from Florida to Cuba, while the Americans had little capability to hunt down the Spanish. But instead, the central government meddled and the Spanish would be bottled up in Santiago de Cuba and destroyed.

In Remember the Maine, we explore not only what actually happened, but also the options available to Cervera had he been allowed to pursue his own plans for the war. The First Edition was a very good game, but we’ve heavily revised the scenario set for the Second Edition (along the same lines as the new Second Edition of Russo-Japanese War). All of them had to be revised to match the new series rules. Beyond that, battle scenarios now highlight each operational scenario, some scenarios with an excessive load of special rules have been completely replaced, and the key operations are now represented by multiple operational scenarios, letting you pick up the action at key decision points. The whole war’s covered, both in terms of operational and battle scenarios. As are the possibilities of an earlier start and a later start to the war. So you get to use all those extra battleships and armored cruisers in action.

The war is mostly remembered for the whole remembering the Maine thing. And the destruction of the Spanish armored cruiser squadron off Santiago de Cuba. Cervera had many options available and planned to use his superior speed to attack American trade and communications. The Ministry of Marine scuttled those possibilities (and Cervera’s fleet) by first insisting that he steam to Santiago, and then making him subordinate to the colony’s governor-general. Turned loose in the Caribbean, the Spanish are a formidable foe. They can’t stand up to the American battleships, but with their edge in speed, they don’t have to. The asymmetric fleets provide each side with unique challenges.

Remember the Maine includes a full sheet of playing pieces, 100 “long” ship pieces and 80 square ones. Our printing process lets us adapt the die-cutting pattern pretty much how we want it (there are some limits, but we no longer are limited to a small set of expensive, specialty-made dies). That let us craft the mix of pieces to fit the game situation instead of a pre-set pattern. That allowed us to provide plenty of pieces for all the ships that took part in the naval campaign of 1898, both in the Caribbean and the Far East. And ships that could have been committed to action, but for whatever reason were not, like the Spanish battleship Pelayo (she was too slow for the strategy Cervera intended to execute).

And then there’s the best set of toys: the ships that didn’t take part in the war at all. The Americans receive all of their pre-dreadnought battleships through the Virginia class, plus Idaho and Mississippi, a pair eventually sold to Greece (these last have never before appeared in a Great War at Sea game in the American colors). And then they get a quartet of battleships that never existed: two examples of the proposed 1892 battleship, and two of a proposed design featuring a triple turret.

The Spanish get their fantasy ships too: the projected sister for Pelayo, and the pair of French-designed battleships the Armada hoped to construct but for which it never received funding. Plus, they get the three British-designed battleships initially requested in 1902 and delayed and revised continually until they became Spain’s only class of dreadnoughts. And a whole set of Italian-built armored cruisers, the class of four Spain wished to acquire (only one of which actually saw action, perishing at the Battle of Santiago before her main armament had even been fitted).

The two-piece paper map covers the entire Caribbean Basin, as it stood in 1898 with Spain still holding her last American colonies. It’s a lovely map, and one we’ll use a great deal in future expansions.

We’ll use Remember the Maine as the core of more new Great War at Sea expansions. We only did that once with the first edition, and that was a download. We’ll be fixing that oversight with new expansions, starting with U.S. Navy Plan Olive, and beyond that as the Germans, British and others flout the Monrow Doctrine at their peril.

You can order Remember the Maine (Second Edition) right here.
Please allow an additional four weeks for delivery.

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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, three children, and his new puppy. His Iron Dog, Leopold, could swim very well.

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