Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet
BGG rating
8.8

Expansion for Great War at Sea: Jutland

Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet

2015

Rules assistance for Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet

Plain-language explanations of turns, card effects and disputed situations, with official source references and saved question history.

  • 1–2 players
  • 30–240 min
  • 12+
  • Complexity 3.0/5

Rules assistant for Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet

What would you like to know?

Answers come from the official rulebook, with the page to check.

Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet is an expansion for Great War at Sea: Jutland released in 2015 for 1–2 players, 30–240 minutes per game, and ages 12 and up. It was designed by Michael Bennighof and its main mechanics are Dice Rolling, Secret Unit Deployment, and Hexagon Grid.

Expansions

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About the game

Description from the publisher: During the brief period between 1906 and 1914, so the story goes, Britain and Germany engaged in a furious naval arms race sparked by the launch of the Royal Navy’s revolutionary battleship Dreadnought. This rivalry, egged on in Germany by Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, then helped ignite the First World War. As usual, reality is a little more complicated than popular history. Tirpitz’s enemy lay not across the North Sea but rather in the War Ministry offices just on the other side of the Brandenburger Tor. Army and Navy battled furiously for funding, inventing, respectively, the (possibly mythical) Schlieffen Plan and the Risk Theory (less mythical, but just as detached from reality) to justify ever-higher levels of spending. In the event, neither got what they wanted: the Navy did not build a new class of dreadnoughts every fiscal year, nor did the Army get to muster two dozen new divisions to “reinforce the right.” But what if Tirpitz had won his real battle? Germany had the financial and industrial resources to build a fleet to challenge the British. What might this fleet have looked like, and how would it have stood up to the Grand Fleet in battle? High Seas Fleet is a supplement for the Great War at Sea series that studies this question with background essays, over two dozen new scenarios, and 70 new scorchless, sootless laser-cut playing pieces. It is not playable by itself; you’ll need our Jutland game (and only our Jutland game) to play the scenarios. You can, of course, just read the essays and fondle the pieces without owning Jutland. We won’t tell. New pieces include German battleships designed but never built: the 1904 semi-dreadnought, the 1905 dreadnought, the 1912 dreadnought with 13.8-inch main guns, and the repeat Baden class super-dreadnoughts. There are additional cruisers and battleships to fill out the classes of the German program, and the full Blücher class of six armored cruisers. This is a powerful fleet that can stand toe-to-toe with the British Grand Fleet – the fleet the propagandists boasted of but Tirpitz feared to actually build. Now you can lead it into battle.

Questions and answers

Great War at Sea: High Seas Fleet supports 1–2 players according to the catalogue. This range comes from the publisher’s listed player count, so the game can be set up for any group size within it. Some setups, rules and scoring details may still vary by player count, so check your edition’s rulebook for the exact configuration.