Sink the Bismarck is a celebration of the inevitability of failure

 Sink the Bismarck is a hit of a historical oddity to me.

I remember seeing it years ago, close to when it originally came out. At that time, I was vaguely aware of Print and Play but it wasn’t any kind of focus for me. I am under the impression that a higher percentage of Print and Plays were war games at the time but I could be totally wrong.

A lot of the ‘early’ print and play war games that I looked at back in the day were hex and chit. Sink the Bismarck is actually more of a push-your-luck game.

The game is about the 1941 sinking of the German battleship Bismarck by the British Royal Navy. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, this was a turning point in the naval part of World War II.

You take on the roll of the Bismarck’s defenders, trying to shoot down the planes and torpedoes that will eventually sink her. There is no winning condition. The battleship is going to sink. You are just trying to see how much at the enemy, you can shoot down before it happens.

The version of the board that I used was simple line art of four tracks leading to the doomed battleship. The last two spaces on each track are where the plane tokens turn into torpedo tokens. Which are harder to hit.

Roll two dice to see if and where two British planes are going to enter the tracks. Place four dice on the track where you think planes or torpedoes are going to move. Roll dice for each plane to see if they go left, right, or straight as they moved down. Any placed die that has a plane or torpedo in the same space to see if you hit it. (Planes get hit on fives and sixes. Torpedos require sixes) Repeat until the Bismarck gets hit five times and sinks.

That’s pretty much the rules. You get 1 point for every plane you shoot down. You get five points for every torpedo you shoot down. Try and beat your best score.

BGG user C Hansen compared Sink the Bismarck to an old school video game and I think they really nailed it. More than anything else, it feels like an adaptation of Space Invaders, despite its historic theme. (I do appreciate it when a game gives you a history lesson though)

The gameplay is very simple and luck-based. In some cases, you can make some very good guesses on dice placement. Planes on the edges are going to go straight down 2/3 of the time and torpedoes just go straight down. But then you have to roll a five or a six or just a six. No way to modify that.

On the positive side, the game delivers the  tension. The planes and torpedos just keep coming and their numbers just keep growing. Failure may be inevitable but trying to stave it off is fun. Honestly, more fun than it has any right to be.

Sink the Bismarck’s strongest selling point it has really minimal construction requirements. One page board with very minimal ink. I just used cubes instead making the airplane/torpedo chits. And I do have plenty of dice around.

Sink the Bismarck has so-so mechanics but remarkably strong tone. The opportunity cost is so low that It doesn’t hurt to try it out.