Bismarck (1st Edition, 1st Printing)

If there’s one ship every naval wargamer knows, it’s the German battleship Bismarck. Forty thousand tons of menace, unleashed into the North Atlantic in the spring of 1941 to wreak havoc on Allied shipping.

The British Home Fleet tried to stop her, but Bismarck’s guns ripped apart the battle cruiser Hood. The pride of the Royal Navy went to the bottom of the Denmark Strait southwest of Iceland and Bismarck disappeared into the fog. But HMS Prince of Wales had managed to hit Bismarck below the water line, and she left behind her a slick of fuel oil. The British Home Fleet relentlessly tracked the German warship, and she finally sank beneath a hail of gunfire.

Bismarck: Commerce Raiding in the North Atlantic is the latest installment in the Second World War at Sea series, and the one wargamers have demanded since the series debuted. The game covers the famous hunt for the Bismarck, but also all of the other German commerce raids into the Atlantic between the fall of 1939 and the summer of 1941. The breakout of the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau is here, the raids of the cruisers Admiral Hipper and Scheer, and much more. Like all games in the series, this one is packed with scenarios.

The German player is trying to sneak past the British picket lines, and then seek out and destroy the vital convoys that bring troops, food and supplies from the rest of the world to Britain. The British player has vastly superior forces, but the Atlantic is a huge place. There’s plenty of open ocean in which a German raider can hide. When more than one of them is loose, the task facing the Royal Navy is even more daunting.