Remember The Maine

Once again I find myself apologising for the lack of posts here. With one thing and another I've not been gaming as much, nor pondering projects. However yesterday I did dig out this old boardgame that I bought more than 30 years ago. In fact I bought it, and hadn't looked at it since. 

'Remember The Maine' covers the Spanish-American War in the Caribbean and Atlantic, with a campaign game allowing squadrons and individual ships to cruise around and seek each other out, whilst trying to resupply with coal where possible. The Americans are looking to blockade Cuban ports and land an invasion force, whilst the Spaniards are looking to break the blockade by running merchant ships to Cuba. Both side also get points for bombarding or raiding the opposing coat. Victory points seem to be set up to allow the Spanish (who are massively outclassed) to still 'win' by making an American victory costly. 

Attached to the main campaign game are two sub-games. Each main Cuban port, and the whole island of Puerto Rico, has a little hex map, and once troops are landed there's a whole set of land combat rules for playing out the individual invasion campaigns. Included in them are a couple of self-contained scenarios. I set up one covering the final attack on Santiago, including the attack on San Juan Hill. 

The US have six turns in which to take Santiago. In each turn each side gets two action phases. In the first action phase US troops took San Juan Hill, and forced the Spanish defenders into the entrenchments around the city. In their phase the Spanish started moving up reinforcements.

In the second action phase of the first turn the US took the city and the Spanish surrendered. 

So not a very exciting game as a standalone exercise. The US forces are overwhelmingly large, and I can't see how the game wouldn't always play out the same. But in a campaign the system would work well. There's a nice mechanism for yellow fever, which is more dangerous to teh US forces than the Spanish are. 

The second sub-game is for the naval actions. It's a simple system involving putting both opposing fleets int lines and shooting at each other until ships sink, closing up the lines. Manuever is covered by each side being allowed to set the range - Short, Long or Sight (no combat). A force at Sight can try to disengage. 

Again there's a small scenario to try out, so I played it. It covers the Spanish breakout from Santiago. Here's teh two fleets in their opposing lines. The Spanish have to escape with at least one cruiser, but cannot escape until they have spent at least one turn at close range.

They immediately moved to close range. There was firing.

Amazingly the Spanish scored hits and, generally, the US didn't. For US battleships got pasted whilst only two Spanish cruisers suffered any hits. 

I misunderstood teh range rules at this point, thinking you could only change by one band (you can, in fact, go to any range from any other range). So instead of going to Sight, the Spanish went to Long first. Their squadron is faster than the US one (their slowest ship is faster than the US squadron's slowest ship), so they Spanish have an edge in changing range. They went to Long and teh US couldn't close. 

There was more firing, although mostly from the US as the Spanish ships can mostly only fire at Close. Again the US navy failed to inflict much damage on the Spanish. 

The Spanish then disengaged and won a convincing victory.

It's a pretty simplistic system, but obviously it's designed for quick actions in the context of the main game.

I then tried setting up the campaign game, but it's basically impossible to play solo. It's also long. It took me an hour to set it up, and whilst the play time is given as 4 hours that assumes around ten minutes per turn, which is highly unlikely. It's a game to play over several days. And it has a lot of bookkeeping too. It was published in 1986 and is very much of its time.

So, a great subject, but after 30 years I've found out that it's a game I'm unlikely to play.

In other news I have been board-gaming. My wife and I have continued the 2026 Tour De France Femmes, and have now played six of the nine stages. I have a small lead, but it's gradually being eroded. In addition I have been reading a book about Stnewall Jackson's 1862 Valley Campaign. There are a couple of scenarios for battles from it in 'Battle Cry', so as I read each one I set it up and played it through a few times. It's a surprisingly interesting way to cement what happened, despite the game being semi-abstract. 

So that's what I've been up to for the past week or so.