“Keep then the sea that is the wall of England;

And then is England kept by Goddes hande.”

– Bishop Adam de Moleyns, The Libel of English Policie, c. 1436

In the Bishop’s day, the launching of a vessel from port or quay promised momentous anticipation. Crossing an ocean the likes of the Atlantic was the ambition of the arrogant or the insane, and lesser voyages could prove hazardous even in cooperative weather. Even there, however, a crew’s fate could only be waited for by those left behind. Once a topmast slipped beneath the sea’s horizon on the leg out, the shore-bound entered a pitiable state of not-knowing the where and when of vessel and crew. Indeed, weeks could stretch into months before word or post arrived.

That game of patience had little to do with a vessel’s velocity. Even though much had changed by the twentieth century, when Prime Minister Winston Churchill was notified that a convoy of merchant ships launched from port, he and his fellow landlubbers had to exercise the quiet endurance of Bishop de Moleyns. This was so despite wireless telegraphy that allowed a captain to send taps and clicks from an antenna, thereby dispatching a message across blustery ocean to a distant listening post, such as the one Churchill’s Admiralty manned beneath Westminster in London. In that low-ceilinged bunker, walls were covered with nautical charts tracing voyages of its vast fleet across the globe. With such an apparatus and staff, with antennae on every vessel in the Royal Navy, you would think the Prime Minister would know the whereabouts of every ship under his command. To his dismay, puffing away at his cigar, he rarely knew the precise locations of the fleet. He and the Admiralty staff labored in a shroud and made decisions in what von Clausewitz called a twilight or fog.

This was so because of caution. A prudent captain dared not break radio silence unless warranted by calamity or in expectation of an impending decision at sea, a reticence learned from training and perhaps experience. When triangulated, even an undecipherable message could expose a vessel and its crew to an enemy with a keen ear. Silent running left Admiralty knowing precisely when and where its ship left port, and precisely when and where it reached its destination, but that stretch between remained vague and fuzzy. Atlantic Chase operates in that fuzziness.

The charts on Churchill’s walls had pins stuck in them, each marking the location of a task force or convoy. Many of the pins were tied together with string, thus charting the trajectory of the vessels from one port to another, or from one location to another. The Map Room was equipped with a cabinet full of pins and thread for just this purpose. Threads stretching from Halifax to The Clyde did not signify a voyage already carried out. Rather, it denoted the expected course that convoy was plying. To the Prime Minister’s frustration, he could not be certain of the convoy’s progress along that trajectory, he had to accept a lack of precision as a good sign. Only if engaged by enemy U-Boats, long range air patrols, or worse, German battlecruisers, would signals from the convoy tell Admiralty its whereabouts. As long as the thread represented the convoy, Churchill could take solace that the enemy had not found it.

Atlantic Chase is predicated on the proposition that a military force can be represented on a game map as a line and not merely as a point. As a line, the ships comprising a task force are located somewhere along that line. To intercept that task force, your opponent must reduce that line to a point, thereby locating it. He will employ a variety of naval and air assets to do this, pursuing strategy to bring on naval engagements favorable to his task forces and detrimental to yours. He will make his lines intersect yours at a point where he would like to find your ships. The design leans towards simplicity rather than complexity, simulating the fog of war in a unique way.This broad strokes game strives to capture the ebb and flow of the military conflict during the rare sorties by the Kreigsmarine, and thus, aims to evoke a narrative of hunter and prey.

The German player must locate and engage convoys with his surface fleet, while avoiding the Royal Navy’s assets. The Home Fleet is formidable and the Kreigsmarine can’t afford losses. It is possible for the British player to locate and engage German task forces before first, however. He will “draw” lines to intersect the German trajectories, hoping to bring them to battle at the point of intersection. In this manner, the hunter can become the hunted and both players vie to dominate operations on the game board.

In Atlantic Chase, the map represents those charts on Churchill’s wall, and their reciprocal in Germany, presenting competing players with provisional information. To achieve victory, a player must clarify the situation, reducing lines to points, both his and his opponents, because only then will he be capable of bringing a target to battle. Cruisers become vital assets, not because they can go toe to toe with enemy battleships, but because they can shadow enemy forces or coordinate with friendly battle groups and help triangulate enemy signals. Air assets do more than deliver a punch, although represented abstractly, they too provide friendly forces with additional eyes.

No double-blind rules, no hidden movement plotted on paper or separate maps, no incremental movement. Players use the game board to plot trajectories across ocean and sea, performing “actions” such as Trajectory, or Naval Search, or Engage. Each player has a menu of ten actions and they may perform as many as they wish until they lose initiative or bring on a battle. A scenario or operation takes an hour or two to play, offering both players a chance to take the initiative. A line on the game board represents a presumed trajectory, and may be reconfigured as the situation changes, clarifies, or initiative changes hands. Lines get shorter or longer, they bend, they resolve momentarily into a point and then, perhaps, if the enemy fails to engage soon enough, springs back into a line. An interception that seems like a sure thing, or a task force that appears far from peril, may soon be rendered as a point, its location in time and space known absolutely, vulnerable to attack from air or sea. For now, anyway.

Atlantic Chase offers something of the anxiety and anticipation experienced by the Prime Minister, his Admiralty, and their counterparts across the Channel. Will that convoy make it to port unmolested? Will it elude the Bismarck? Will the Home Fleet engage that beast of a battleship first?

Fortunately, unlike Churchill, players won’t puff through more than a single cigar waiting to find out.

Author: Jeremy (Jerry) White