Don't Give Up the Ship is a set of rules for conducting Napoleonic era naval wargames. The game was published by Guidon Games in 1972 and republished by TSR, Inc. in 1975. It was the first collaboration between Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons. D&D fans may also recognize the name of contributor Mike Carr, who edited the rules and researched the historical single ship actions that are included as game scenarios.
Guidon Games produced board games and rulebooks for wargaming with miniatures, and in doing so influenced Tactical Studies Rules, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons. The Guidon Games publishing imprint was the property of Lowrys Hobbies, a mail-order business owned by Don and Julie Lowry. About a dozen titles were released under the imprint from 1971 to 1973.
David Lance "Dave" Arneson was an American game designer best known for co-developing the first published role-playing game (RPG), Dungeons & Dragons, with Gary Gygax, in the early 1970s. Arneson's early work was fundamental to the development of the genre, developing the concept of the RPG using devices now considered to be archetypical, such as adventuring in "dungeons" and using a neutral judge who doubles as the voice and consciousness of all other characters to develop the storyline.
Ernest Gary Gygax was an American game designer and author best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson.
James Lawrence was an American naval officer. During the War of 1812, he commanded USS Chesapeake in a single-ship action against HMS Shannon commanded by Philip Broke. He is probably best known today for his last words or "dying command" "Don't give up the ship!", which is still a popular naval battle cry, and which was invoked by Oliver Hazard Perry's personal battle flag, adopted to commemorate his dead friend.
Chesapeake was a 38-gun wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy. She was one of the original six frigates whose construction was authorized by the Naval Act of 1794. Joshua Humphreys designed these frigates to be the young navy's capital ships. Chesapeake was originally designed as a 44-gun frigate but construction delays, material shortages, and budget problems caused builder Josiah Fox to alter her design to 38 guns. Launched at the Gosport Navy Yard on 2 December 1799, Chesapeake began her career during the Quasi-War with France and saw service in the First Barbary War.
Oliver Hazard Perry was an American naval commander, born in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. He was the son of Sarah Wallace Alexander and United States Navy Captain Christopher Raymond Perry and the older brother of Commodore Matthew C. Perry.
In the foreword, Gygax writes about the genesis of the rules:
During 1968 I began to gather material in an attempt to devise some sort of rules to encompass the single-ship actions of the War of 1812, but it soon became apparent that the task was going to require more than an offhand effort [...] it wasn't until next year [1969] at the Lake Geneva wargames convention that things began moving again. There Dave Arneson displayed some of his 1:1200 sailing ship models, and in a subsequent discussion of my attempt he mentioned that his group [the MMSA] in Minneapolis-St. Paul were currently developing just such a set of rules. Thereafter began a long correspondence wherein we exchanged rules and ideas [...] while Mike Carr eventually joined us in order to devise much of the optional rules and arrange the mass of material Dave and I had put together.
The War of 1812 was a conflict fought between the United States, the United Kingdom, and their respective allies from June 1812 to February 1815. Historians in Britain often see it as a minor theater of the Napoleonic Wars; in the United States and Canada, it is seen as a war in its own right.
Gen Con is the largest tabletop-game convention in North America by both attendance and number of events. It features traditional pen-and-paper, board, and card games, including role-playing games, miniatures wargames, live action role-playing games, collectible card games, and strategy games. Gen Con also features computer games. Attendees engage in a variety of tournament and interactive game sessions. In 2015, Gen Con had 61,423 unique attendees, making it one of the largest conventions in North America.
The Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA) is a group of wargamers and military figurine collectors active during the late 1960s and 1970s.
June 1971 International Wargamer which contained Don't Give Up the Ship rules
After they met for the first time at Gen Con, due to their joint interest in ship battles, they decided to collaborate on a new game, Don't Give Up the Ship![1]:6 By 1971, Arneson and Gygax had produced a draft version of the game.[2] The game was published in 1971, and became another of Guidon Games's "Wargaming with Miniatures" line releases.[1]:6 They circulated the rules at Gen Con that year, and began serializing them in the pages of the International Wargamer. The early rules show a significant debt to Fletcher Pratt's naval wargame system, which Arneson had played heavily in the Twin Cities. Later, in the pages of the International Wargamer, Arneson would also publish a list of fighting ships of the Great Age of Sail for use in naval miniature simulations.
The International Federation of Wargaming (IFW) was a wargaming club operated from 1967 to early 1970s.
Murray Fletcher Pratt was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy and history. He is best known for his works on naval history and on the American Civil War and for fiction written with L. Sprague de Camp.
The rules that Gygax and Arneson developed call for pencil and paper, six-sided dice, rulers and protractors, and model ships, ideally of 1:1200 scale. Single ship engagements can be played on a tabletop, but fleet battles require more space. Arneson had previously played Fletcher Pratt wargames on a classroom floor at the University of Minnesota, and the distances in Don't Give Up the Ship also exceed the dimensions of a tabletop.[3]
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota. The Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses are approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) apart, and the St. Paul campus is actually in neighboring Falcon Heights. It is the oldest and largest campus within the University of Minnesota system and has the sixth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 50,943 students in 2018-19. The university is the flagship institution of the University of Minnesota system, and is organized into 19 colleges and schools, with sister campuses in Crookston, Duluth, Morris, and Rochester.
Wind speed and direction are determined by a roll of the dice; sail ships can only make slow progress against the wind by tacking. A protractor is used to measure the angle between the wind direction and the ship direction, and this determines ship speed.
Tacking or coming about is a sailing maneuver by which a sailing vessel, whose desired course is into the wind, turns its bow toward the wind so that the direction from which the wind blows changes from one side to the other, allowing progress in the desired direction. The opposite maneuver to tacking is called jibing, or wearing on square-rigged ships, that is, turning the stern through the wind. No sailing vessel can move directly upwind, though that may be the desired direction, making this an essential maneuver of a sailing ship. A series of tacking moves, in a zig-zag fashion, is called beating, and allows sailing in the desired direction.
A protractor is a measuring instrument, typically made of transparent plastic or glass, for measuring angles. Most protractors measure angles in degrees (°). Radian-scale protractors measure angles in radians. Most protractors are divided into 180 equal parts. Some precision protractors further divide degrees into arcminutes.
The protractor is also called into use to determine which cannons can fire on an enemy ship. Cannons can aim at the masts or at the hull, and the chance of hitting is 5 in 6 at short range (4") and 1 in 6 at long range (16"). The amount of damage from a hit is determined by the weight of the cannonball.
The rules are elaborate and cover morale, sinking, fires, broken masts, and boarding. The conclusion of the book provides the statistics necessary to re-enact historical encounters such as took place between the USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere on August 19, 1812. The second edition adds 4 pages of simplified rules for battles between fleets, as well as a map for the Battle of Trafalgar. However, detailed scenario information is not included to reproduce the battle.
The original Guidon Games edition of Don't Give Up the Ship also included a detachable sheet to detail the qualities of ships and track their state through the game. This served as a precedent for later character sheets in role-playing games pioneered by Arneson and Gygax.[4]
Ships of the Line
Dave Arneson developed a set of naval campaign rules for the Great Age of Sail called Ships of the Line which he intended as a sequel to Don't Give Up the Ship. It collected many of the naval rules from Arneson's ongoing Napoleonic campaign, as documented in his fanzine Corner of the Table. From a September 1972 introduction written by Gary Gygax which is attached to surviving drafts, it would appear that Guidon Games originally planned to publish Ships of the Line.[5] In 1975, TSR Hobbies added Ships of the Line to its product roadmap, and the title is listed as forthcoming in some TSR advertisements of the day, for example in Strategic Review #3. However, no published edition of Ships of the Line ever appeared. Arneson distributed some photocopies to local gamers in the Twin Cities and to remote play-by-post participants in his Napoleonic campaign.
Another planned TSR title, Naval Orders of Battle, aimed to provide statistics on ships of the Great Age of Sail, compiling work which Arneson published in the International Federation of Wargaming zine the International Wargamer in 1972. It too never appeared.
Legacy
Mike Carr (in yellow) runs Don't Give Up the Ship at Gen Con 2013
Although Don't Give Up the Ship has been out of print for decades, it is still played and studied, due to the high profiles of the game's creators. Mike Carr himself has run the game for groups at gaming conventions in 2013 and 2014, including Gen Con and GaryCon.
Editions
1st edition, 1972, Guidon Games, 50 pages, blue & black cover
2nd edition, 1975, TSR, Inc., 58 pages, blue, white & black cover
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