The Wargamer

Grab a convoy of more than 30 merchantmen, a close escort of some 20-odd destroyers, minesweepers, rescue ships, and subs. Round it out with a bunch of cruisers, a couple of battleships, even more destroyers, and a Brit carrier. Next, square that off against the Tirpitz, Lutzow, Admiral Scheer, Hipper, land-based bombers, and scads of U-boats. Now say “Murmansk” ten times fast. Can you smell what the Dönitz is cookin’? Ya, I think you can.

If that kind of maritime wargame floats your boat, listen up. There’s a game you need to know about.

A few months back while perusing the P500 list at GMT games, I came across tersely-titled game called PQ-17. Knowing just enough about the Battle of the Atlantic in World War Two to know the difference between a pocket battleship and a pocket protector, I dove in. The result is this interview with designer Chris Janiec, the man behind PQ-17, a game named after the ill-fated convoy that was absolutely pasted by the Germans on its way to Murmansk in 1942.

While the game takes that convoy as its namesake, the period of warfare the game covers is much broader, as is the potential for what appears to be a new operational-level naval gaming series on the horizon. Read on.

Convoy battles and U-boats on ice … it’s about dang time

Pete Gade: First off, this seems like a piece of subject matter that hasn’t seen the tabletop treatment in recent years—and heck if it’s been covered thoroughly in the first place at all. What was it about the Arctic and Barents convoy battles drew you to design PQ-17?

Chris Janiec: Alea magazine did publish a game called Nordkapp in 2004 covering, I believe, three actions, but I’ve never seen it. I actually started working on this project in 1994 when I was trying to come up with a naval system that would work with Columbia Games’ EuroFront. It didn’t take long to recognize that any system that tied into EF would have to be too abstract to be practical and would lose most of the “flavor” I wanted. I had enough material for a more detailed operational game, though, and decided to pursue that instead. I chose the Arctic theater for the first test scenario because of the relatively limited number of ships and aircraft involved … it had absolutely nothing to do with my living in Iceland at that time.

Upon returning to the US in 1995, I tested the initial rules with old friend Dana Lombardy, then tinkered with them on and off until finally getting serious over three years ago. I had always intended the basic game system to apply to any WWII theater, but when it came down to actively developing the first title, I wanted to make sure it worked in the most difficult circumstances to model, and that’s the Arctic. The combination of extreme weather conditions, ice, widely varying hours of daylight, large distances, and length of individual operations is unmatched. The only element of naval operations missing was carrier vs. carrier battles, and by adding in Graf Zeppelin (the sole real alternative-history unit in the game), that could also be tested. So by overcoming the challenges of simulating the Arctic battles, I could be confident the resulting system would work in other theaters.

This choice of a relatively obscure topic by an unproven designer has resulted in, shall we say, a marketing challenge. I hope the innovative solutions to the problems of simulating naval operations in a board wargame will ultimately sway the skeptics to give PQ-17 a try and pave the way for the success of the system.