The Wine-Dark Sea:
The Game
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
February 2023

And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and painful experiences in war and on the stormy seas.

With Great War at Sea: The Wine-Dark Sea, we return Avalanche Press to where we started: the Mediterranean theater of World War One. With Great War at Sea finally getting a Second Edition of its series rules, it’s fitting to give the series a completely new look at one of my favorite topics.

I have this vision. It’s probably a silly vision, one I should abandon to crank out as many games as we can fit through the door (and get a bigger door, too). Instead, I want to weave history and game-play together, to let the game help tell the story of the event. And none of their stories attract me like that of The Wine-Dark Sea.

On the surface, it’s a fairly obscure story: World War One naval operations in the Mediterranean Sea, between three fleets that saw little combat during the period. The headline event is the British chase after the German battle cruiser Goeben, but we also have the operations in the Adriatic Sea and Central Mediterranean, both those actually executed and those planned, with the French, Austro-Hungarian and Italian fleets.

Even in its Second Edition, Great War at Sea remains a fairly simple game to play, as wargames go (it’s not really suitable for Family Game Night, but you’re going to be done playing in one evening rather than multiple weekends). The game system’s solid enough that we used the First Edition rulebook for more than 25 years, but over all those years we added some additional rules and some clarifications in the “special rules” section that leads off each game’s scenario book (or expansion). Those moved to the core rules for the Second Edition. The system’s had to be very sound to last that long; we definitely don’t subscribe to this little industry’s “fix it in the living rules” attitude.

The Wine-Dark Sea is presented in a series of scenarios; a scenario is simply a different way to play a game. Some games have just one scenario, others have many. Games like Great War at Sea and Panzer Grenadier have huge numbers of scenarios, allowing players to re-fight lots of different battles.

Great War at Sea (and its offspring, Second World War at Sea) has two types of scenarios. Operational scenarios take place on the operational map, the one that shows the seas were the campaign took place (in this case, the Mediterranean Sea from Batumi on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus to Gibraltar on the other end). You plot the movements of your fleets on the operational map (there aren’t many fleets in play, so that’s not as hard as it sounds) a few turns ahead, and when they meet up, play moves to the Naval Tactical Map, where they fight.

There, the ships maneuver and they sheet at each other with guns and torpedoes. You roll dice to resolve that; roll a 6, get a hit. Ships with more and bigger guns roll more dice. You roll more dice to see where that hit landed on the target ship. Then you mark off damage on the ship data sheet, and see if the ship sinks. Little ships sink fast; battleships are hard to sink.

Battle scenarios just take place on the Naval Tactical Map, skipping all the maneuvering and getting straight to the fighting.

Like our more recent games, The Wine-Dark Sea is organized into chapters, each of those chapters telling a story. Each chapter is built around a series of operational scenarios, and each operational scenario has a set of battle scenario based on the battles that arose from, or could have arisen from, those operations. With that, we have the background story of each chapter, so you can both read along and play along with naval campaigns that aren’t usually mentioned much in histories of the war.

There weren’t all that many battles in the Mediterranean and Adriatic 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.

That approach meshes very well with our heavy concentration on history; when we talk about an operation that came close to battle, or was intended to seek battle, you still get to play it out and make your own attempt at bringing the enemy to battle – or, in some cases, avoiding that battle to accomplish something else (a bombardment, an invasion, a convoy escort). To really understand the mind-set of each side’s admirals, you have to look at what might have happened right alongside what did happen.

The Allies seemingly have a preponderance of force, with Britain, France and Italy arrayed against Austria-Hungary, but that’s not exactly so. The French are at the end of a long and tenuous supply line, and their advantage in firepower over the Austro-Hungarians is slender. The Italians are about on par with the French, but they won’t cooperate with them so the Austrians can try to thread the needle and face only one of them. Once the British reinforce the theater the Allied edge grows even stronger, but the question of Allied fleet command again prevents true cooperation.

The Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy is out-numbered, and as the war goes on its crew quality steadily deteriorates – while the Germans were able to send their High Seas Fleet into the Baltic for open-water training, the Austrians can only venture into the Fasana Channel outside their main fleet base at Pola for gunnery exercises. But they usually get to choose the time and place of operations, which is a decided edge in naval operations in general and Great War at Sea in particular.

As with the Second Edition Great War at Sea games, The Wine-Dark Sea has full-color play aids, a beautiful map and of course our die-cut and silky-smooth pieces. A game that has this much effort poured into its history and game-play needs to be beautiful.

We’ve done Great War at Sea games set in the Mediterranean before, but The Wine-Dark Sea is a completely new game, not an update: the scenarios, map and pieces are all brand-new and not compatible with the previous games. We’ll expand it, with books like Turkish Waters (the Black Sea campaigns) and Secret Treaties (the Triple Alliance war plan); those will only be compatible with The Wine-Dark Sea, not the previous games. We’re making a fresh start, and it is a great game.

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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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