Marine-Spiel

This turn of the century German game stands out for its magnificent artwork and very unusual board. The box cover shows a pre-dreadnought battleship slicing through the sea, from off its starboard bow, while the board initially unfolds to show a side-on view of the ship with no apparent game features. However, the board image then unfolds further from the ship's main deckline to reveal a schematic of the ship's compartments, a 46-space roll-and-move track from a bunkroom in the bow to the engine room. The artwork in the gameboard portion is highly detailed, with images of furniture, seamen at work and varied ship's stores, but in a plain red ink against a white background. There are six playing pieces, highly detailed human figures in different uniforms and dress, printed on cardboard and standing in coloured wooden disks. Both the cover illustration and the board take considerable artistic liberties with technical details. The ship on the cover looks very much like the 1898-commissioned pre-dreadnought battleship Kaiser Wilhelm III, but has an extra funnel and is missing a side turret. The ship on the board has the correct two funnels, but is missing the barbette gun beside the main forward turret as well as one of the three side turrets, and has no rear turret. The ships fly non-existent and therefore neutral flags of horizontal stripes, but are red-yellow-blue on the cover and red-blue-yellow on the board. The cover art is signed with the initials SR, while the board art is unsigned, which may explain the differences in detail. The lack of any publisher information is unusual for a German game of such high quality. —user summary