Mediterranean:
Publisher's Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2014

It’s our oldest game that’s been more or less continuously in print, our best-selling wargame ever and the one game that built Avalanche Press. Great War at Sea: Mediterranean has shown staying power despite a fairly slender amount of website support considering the game’s age and popularity. So it’s about time it got the Publisher’s Preview treatment.

The topic is hardly one on which to build a franchise, let alone a long-lived game publishing house: the naval side of the First World War in the Mediterranean and adjacent seas (Black Sea and Adriatic). Yet it’s been a steady seller for almost two decades now, with no signs of slowing down. At one point, the owner of a game distributor (Michael Cox, of Centurion Hobby Distribution) anointed it as “the game that saved board wargames.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration, though I like quoting it because of the angina it gives the online bloviating buffoons. Even so, what is it about this game?

So far it's appeared in two editions, with four different covers, not counting foreign-language editions. The most recent cover is far and away the most attractive, with Alex Kircher's fine painting of the Austrian battleship Viribus Unitis at sea. Since I designed the game primarily so I could play with the Austro-Hungarian navy, it finally has a suitable cover.

Mediterranean (originally named SMS Goeben) was the first game we did to present a “box of toys” to the gamer. It comes with a staggering 70 (seventy) scenarios. We’ve continued that pattern with many other games on both land and sea, but I don’t know that it had been done before by anyone else.

Crafting 70 scenarios was an enormous amount of work, featuring all sorts of archival research (that is, looking at original source documents in military archives, back in the days when you had to go there and blow the dust off the papers) and secondary source readings in four languages, but I’d been at it for a dozen years by the time Mediterranean was published. The game is actually a combination of three others: one about the Black Sea campaigns, one based on the Austro-Hungarian fleet and the campaign in the Adriatic Sea, and finally one centered on the voyage of the German battle cruiser Goeben across the Mediterranean Sea in the opening days of the Great War. Those added up to 50 or 60 scenarios, and the rest come from conflicts like the Italo-Turkish War and the Balkan Wars.

This many years later, I’m still really proud of the scenario set. There weren’t all that many battles in the Mediterranean, Adriatic and Black Seas, but that’s not a problem for the Great War at Sea game system. The operational game models missions – when the fleets went to sea with violent intent. The scenario remains valid even if they failed to meet in the actual event, just like it’s valid when battle did result historically but the players failed to find one another in the game version. And there were plenty of opportunities for fleet battles in the Mediterranean, with at least one side at sea and seeking its enemies.

I’ve written a lot of scenarios for a lot of games; some of my favorites are still those from Mediterranean. The cat-and-mouse balance of Goeben on the Black Sea, hunted by the Russian pre-dreadnought squadron, make for several really fine play experiences. I like the sequence of scenarios in which the Austrians try to stop the Serbs from evacuating to Corfu. And of course there’s the main event, the escape of Goeben from the French and British squadrons hunting her.

If I had them to do over, I think I’d strengthen the campaign narrative between the scenarios. The individual scenarios are good, some of them very good, but there should have been more to link them – interweaved with historical essays like Russo-Japanese War, and with conclusions as well as introductions. I also think I’d increase the scenario count to 100; while the game covers the historical events very thoroughly it’s actually light on hypotheticals and I don’t feel like I made enough use of the ships begun or planned but never completed, like the Italian Caracciolo class and Austrian Ersatz Monarch class.

The map covers the Mediterranean basin from Batum at the far eastern end of the Black Sea to a point just east of Gibraltar. Gibraltar itself is not on the map - the British base there played no serious role in the Great War - but I've always wanted to publish an extension map just because.

Looking at the toys, there is a wonderful mix of pieces included. There are ships from 11 nations included, ranging from the pretty large contingents of Austria-Hungary, Italy, France and Russia through mid-sized ones from Britain and Turkey on down to the miniscule fleets of Bulgaria and Romania. There are all the famous ships (well, most of them aren’t very famous, so maybe that should read “all the ships slightly recognizable to a handful of nerds”), many ships that saw only a little action, and then some planned or begun but never completed.

The pieces show a deck view of the ship in question if it’s a cruiser or larger, on a one-inch-long piece. Smaller ships have a silhouette and occupy a half-inch square piece; really small ships are grouped together to share a piece. They’re very attractive and have been extremely popular since the game debuted.

The one real drawback here is the presence of “alternate play backs.” Instead of the standard silhouette on a generic blue-gray background as with most of our naval games, there’s a pretty bland silhouette and all the game information from the front. It’s not that they’re ugly; they’re just kind of plain. Okay, really boringly dull and plain. They interfere somewhat with game play of the game, making it impossible to hide your ships from an enemy during the early, Fog of War stage of tactical combat. I should never have allowed these to exist.

Those pretty pieces (the pretty side, anyway) drove a major change in the rules – “Great War at Sea” was designed as an operational game, with a very simple tactical system where you line up your pieces on the table and blaze away at each other with dice. That system’s still in there, as the “basic combat” rules. The original developer for the series, Brian Knipple, felt the pieces just demanded to be moved around on a map and we came up with a tactical game that’s still pretty simple; the game’s about naval operations, not about armor penetration and crossing the T. There’s a more involved tactical system presented in our Dreadnoughts book supplement (which also has many additional pieces and scenarios).

The heart of the game is the single-map operational game - you place the fleets of both players on the map, but movement is plotted several turns ahead. So you can see where the enemy was, but not where he is now as reports from various sources filter back to your flagship.

With that very solid rules system, we’ve since gone on to craft a whole array of games on naval operations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The series will continue on for many years and through many more games, but it all had its start with just one little game on a little-known ship’s even lesser-known adventures on the Black Sea. I’ve designed, developed or published a couple hundred games or supplements since then, but Great War at Sea: Mediterranean remains my favorite.

Order Great War at Sea: Mediterranean right now!

Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and award-winning journalist, he has published over 100 books, games and articles on historical subjects. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children and his dog, Leopold.