""Fifteen Minute Jutland" - Ian Drury - MW nos. 88 & 89" Topic

Is there a way of getting access to old Miniature Wargames magazines, like the (really rather excellent) Prime option for Wargames Illustrated, which gives access to the whole back catalogue? I came across a reference to the above article and would like to read it, but the only option I have found so far would be to buy a hard copy of no.89 (October 1990) on ebay – I have found no trace of no.88 …

Bloomin 'eck Colkitto – Great minds – I was just trying to find this myself yesterday!!

If I remember correctly Issue 89 has the actual rules, whereas 88 has the set up and how it was played. Basically it was run like a TEWT (Tactical Exercise Without Troops) with each squadron having a commander and a signals officer as the commands were all in different rooms, or spread out so they couldn't talk.

There were some interesting mechanics in the set up, for example each commander had a map and scale rule but no protractor, so after a few changes in direction no one was really certain of their actual position (the umpires plotted the actual positions). The players only got to see the table with miniatures when the tactical situation was too complex to describe properly, and when they did any area and models not within visual range were covered in large sheets of paper.

The author described the frustration of senior commanders desperately sending signals and getting inadequate responses as players in action got caught up in the excitement – it all sounded superb.

The rules themselves had 15 minute turns and movement and firing was by divisions. It was brutally simple but seemed to work well in the games I played with the rules some thirty years ago.

DDs and TBDs were interesting – when an attack was ordered the player would dice with modifiers to see how close they would get before launching torpedoes. They would then have to spend time reforming before being effective again.

All this is from memory and it was over thirty years ago, so apologies if I've misremembered any of the details.

I'd be fascinated if anyone finds them – I'd even be tempted to break out the 1/6000 battelcruisers :)

Nick

Nice to hear from you, Nick – and what an odd coincidence! I came across this the other day in the bibliography to Tim Gow's Iron Ships and Wooden Heads and thought it might be worth reading in the never ending search for ways to "do" Jutland. Unfortunately my collection (built up over a veeeery long time so not really in the market for replacement …) is 1/3000, which as Tim G says is actually too big. In those circumstances my preferred solution remains the one by Paul Hague which set me off down this route many years ago (1 model per 2 capital ships, basically) although I think one of Phil Dunn's books has a variant.

Dying to ask how your Tanker War rules are coming along ;-)

And of course thanks for the summary. I *had* thought/hoped "15 min Jutland" might be like the "One Hour Jutland" variant (on Martin Rapier's page? Fun, anyway), so useful to know that it isn't!

Ah yes – those Tanker War rules!

Been on holiday and had various real life things to sort, but Henry is wanting to play the campaign so there will be activity on the blog again soon I hope.

For the actual rules, I've got them working exactly the way I want now so I just need to write it up properly, though the ASW part is still causing problems. I feel that ASW has to be abstracted in a surface game – to do subs justice they really need to have a game of their own.

All the best matey,

Nick

Not long ago (December 2021), Ian Drury and his brother staged a refight of Jutland using 1/1200th scale models and a version of Fletcher Pratt's naval war game rules. The process of measuring ranges was greatly speeded up by the umpires using laser measuring devices.

The battle took place on the empty floor of a central London office. A report can be read here =
link

I only managed 'One Hour Jutland' by making each ship model represent an awful lot of real ones. De Bellis Navalis by Colin Standish takes a similar approach.

I was just watching Ian Drury on YouTube, "Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll".

colkitto – I have issues 88 and 89 – happy to help you out if you share your email.

This actually sounds like a lot of fun, and I don't do much naval wargaming besides ACW ironclads.

I was just watching Ian Drury on YouTube, "Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll".

No, not that Ian Drury …

Hit me with your rhythm stick!.

Magweb was an archive of just about every wargame magazine article ever written. What a great resource it was. Then from what I understand, the entire archive was lost due to some kind of computer issue and apparently no backups were ever made.

If you need to look anything up have elecronic copies of Miniature Wargames 1-350 and Wargames Illustrated 1-225 & Wargames World 1-5.

Wargamers Ians name is Dury, not Drury.

@BillyNM – that's very good of you. I think I am persuaded by Nick's summary that I don't actually need this, but many thanks for the offer. Am I right in thinking that there were CDs of MW available at one time? Should have bought them while I had the chance.

@Martin R: having one base per manoeuvre unit (battle squadron) is a neat solution, if I may say so. The only refinement I could suggest would be one base per division (4 capital ships) which would allow the adoption of cruising formation. From memory this was Phil Dunn's solution in "Fury at Sea". DBN is another favourite of mine, although I have only used it for the RJW.

ALso, in my own defence, I took "Drury" from the ISWH article in WI 175 …

@colkitto, yep, luckily I did buy the CDs – and the printed copies I gave up on MW at issue 420+ as it was never very good after the cuurent owners acquired it. I then sold all the printed magazines apart from the issues of all three from when Duncan MacFarlane was the editor – timeless classics.

Russ MagWeb Lockwood here borrowing Dennis' computer for a sec…For the historical record, you understand :)

MagWeb's demise was from a lightning strike and flood at our ISP. The back-ups were unfortunately at the same site. I have a backup of all the magazine content, but what we lost were all the back-end accounting code. I put up a version for about a year as we figured out what to do, but ultimately, it would prove too expensive to recreate.

Among the 162 magazines MagWeb carried, alas, Miniature Wargames was not one of them.

But thank you for your fond remembrances of it.