Don't Give Up the Ship!

Don't Give Up the Ship

Rules for the Great Age of Sail
Cover for the first edition of Don't Give Up the Ship (1972). Artwork by Don Lowry
Designer(s)	Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax and Mike Carr
Illustrator(s)	Don Lowry
Publisher(s)	Guidon Games TSR, Inc.
Years active	1972-1975
Players	3 - 18
Age range	12 and up
Playing time	six hours

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.

The name comes from the dying words of James Lawrence to the crew of his USS Chesapeake, later stitched into an ensign created by Purser Samuel Hambleton and raised by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie, during the War of 1812.

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.