Great War at Sea - Prizes of War

The idea of taking a former enemy (or even an ally’s) warships and making them part of your own fleet at times excites diplomats and journalists (as with the French fleet in 1940, or the Central Powers navies after World War One). In practice, it’s actually fairly rare, chiefly thanks to maintenance problems.

That usually doesn’t stop the fleets of defeated nations from becoming bargaining chips, even before their owner’s collapse. Rumors swirled around the French and Russian fleets during the First World War. Russia, of course, actually collapsed and some Russian warships came under German and/or British control. France did not, but wobbled under the weight of Army mutinies and battlefield defeat, and offered to sell her incomplete battleships to the British.

That’s the premise of Jutland: Prizes of War, an expansion book for Great War at Sea: Jutland (and only for Jutland). For the most part, these are only the modern, useful ships as the British and especially the Germans didn’t bother to man their own over-aged pre-dreadnoughts and certainly wouldn’t have bothered with foreign models.

The book includes 23 new scenarios, and 80 new silky-smooth, die-cut playing pieces: 60 “long” ship pieces (29 British, 31 German) and 20 standard-sized square ones (all German). The long ship pieces have brand-new artwork, too: the new printing process we use is so sharp that it reveals all the previously-obscured flaws of the old art).