The King’s Ships
Publisher’s Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2022

We launched the story of The Second Great War at Sea with a massive expansion set, The Cruel Sea. The Cruel Sea tells the story of the first eight months of this conflict that never happened in the North Atlantic, with the Imperial German High Seas Fleet fending off commerce-raiding French and Russian squadrons in the Arctic and North Atlantic.

That story ended in March 1941, with the Germans fighting to keep their supply lines open to the United States, and their enemies trying to break it. The Germans hold bases in Iceland and The Faroes to help out, and their long-range airships give them a decided edge in command, control, communications and intelligence.

The King’s Ships picks up the story from there. It’s an even larger expansion set, adding more Germans, French and Russians plus introducing the Royal Navy and the Royal Netherlands Navy to the Second Great War at Sea. They’ve appeared before, with the British showing up in small numbers in Tropic of Capricorn and Tropical Storm and the Dutch having a leading role in the out-of-print (and permanently retired) Royal Netherlands Navy. But this time, the Royal Navy gets the deluxe treatment.

The Second Great War at Sea is a battleship war, and the Grand Fleet (the designation still holds a generation after the First Great War) brings plenty of battleships to the party. The Britain of this reality is a richer nation than that of our own world: in this history, Woodrow Wilson’s December 1916 attempt to mediate an end to the Great War is successful, and all of the participants are spared another two years of bloodshed and destruction. In Britain’s case, the near-bankrupting of the United Kingdom is avoided, and British heavy industry is far more capable of building and maintaining a powerful Royal Navy (and the Exchequer is far more capable of paying for this outlay).

The oldest ships in the Grand Fleet are the eleven “super dreadnoughts” with ten 13.5-inch guns apiece, all laid down in the last few years of peace before the Great War. The naval limitations treaties of this world encourage retention of older warships rather than scrapping them, and so the old dreadnoughts have been thoroughly modernized to create a more-or-less homogenous class of eleven ships. They carry the new 14-inch Mark VII steel rifles created for the King George V class fast battleships of our own reality. Along with the old dreadnoughts, the three surviving battle cruisers of the “Splendid Cats” classes have received similar reconstruction.

We added additional a few ships to the Royal Navy in Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet; modernized versions of these show up in The King’s Ships, too. We added a great many more in Great War at Sea: Jutland 1919, and these also show up in The King’s Ships.

But British battleship design did not end with the Great War. We have the well-known (well-known to Ship Guy, anyway) N3 battleship and G3 battle cruiser designs, which also appear in their original form in the upcoming Great War at Sea: U.S. Navy Plan Emerald. Here they’ve been modernized for a new generation’s war.

British design practice for the most part shifted to smaller ships after those monsters were put to paper, as the British government sought to contain costs by convincing the world’s naval powers to accept treaties limiting battleships to small, weak vessels compared to those laid down at the end of the Great War. I decided that the designs for ships with 12-inch guns were more properly called coast defense ships in the realm of the Second Great War, but there were alternative designs with 16-inch and 18-inch guns, and we have those in The King’s Ships.

In the first iterations of the Second Great War at Sea, I tried to use as many of the existing pieces from their core games as possible. I decided to go back on that a little for The King’s Ships – you’ll still need many cruisers and destroyers from Bismarck and Arctic Convoy, but the battleships and battle cruisers (and aircraft carriers) are all new. The King George V-class fast battleships are replaced by a proposed design with nine new-model 15-inch guns in three triple turrets.

Even though we’ll make use of existing pieces for cruisers and destroyers, The King’s Ships brings the Royal Navy still more of them. The Admiralty estimated a need for 70 cruisers during the interwar years, and here, they finally get them. Of course, they get them as alternative designs, not just repeats of classes found in other Second World War at Sea games, because we know what Ship Guy wants.

The Netherlands enters the Second Great War in September 1941, following aggressive British interference with Dutch trade. The Dutch fleet in The King’s Ships is large and modern, a considerable accretion of strength for the Central Powers in the North Atlantic.

The core of the Dutch fleet in European waters is formed by older dreadnoughts, like those of other nations they’ve been modernized for this new era. They also possess fast battle cruisers, powerful heavy cruisers and hefty forces of destroyers and submarines – the Netherlands was not invited to the naval limitations talks, and so its ships are not subject to any limits.

That gives the Royal Netherlands Navy a force of oversized heavy cruisers and large destroyers maximized for surface combat – the ships the real Dutch admirals wished to build, but were balked by budgetary limits. Without a Great Depression in this line of history, Dutch naval budgets are far more generous than in our own history, and that allows creation and maintenance of a true surface navy backed by plenty of submarines.

And we get more Germans – new construction entering service, and some ships deployed from the Baltic Fleet into the North Atlantic. It’s not enough to replace the attrition of the first eight months of war, and definitely not enough to balance the entry of the Royal Navy into the conflict, but it will help.

With the entry of Britain, the strategic situation quickly sees a complete change. Where the French and Russians interfered with German trade, the British have the force to completely cut it off, and now it’s the turn of the Germans to interfere with British sea communications while looking to get some of their own convoys past, either by stealth or by force. Meanwhile the British are trying to take Iceland from them and seal off their access to the North Atlantic.

Like The Cruel Sea before it, The King’s Ships is a toybox for other Second Great War books – we’ll draw on its huge mix of pieces to tell stories in other parts of the world, so we don’t have to double up and print the same piece in multiple places (thus allowing us to use that space for more new stuff, which is more fun).

It's a big set, because we’re telling a big story. The King’s Ships follows the chapter structure we like to use, where the scenarios move the story forward. Because of the fluid strategic situation, both sides have the operational initiative at times, though the British steadily gain the upper hand. – at least until the First Lord of the Admiralty orders an attack on American warships escorting a convoy within the restricted zone. But that story’s part of the next massive expansion set.

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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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