History of the Rules

The Fred Jane had always been interested in naval wargaming since he played early games on the local village pond. He developed a set of realistic rules over a number of years until it received widespread publicity when it was presented in an engineering journal to a wider audience.

He had been collecting data for his game since he was commissioned to cover a set of naval manoeuvres (wargames with real ships) in 1889. During this exercise, he sketched profiles of over 100 ships. When he first published the game, the rules only included profiles of just four British Royal Navy ships. So there was immediately a demand for more profiles.

Jane initially responded by releasing data for British and German ships, which caused outrage in the press that exclaimed that 'Germany was our friend'. In order to demonstrate impartiality, he published All the World's Fighting Ships (now Jane's Fighting Ships) in 1898.

This book included silhouettes of the ships and the ship cards for the original game, for example the encoding of the gun and armour data. E.g.

WARSPITE (1884).
L: 315 ft. = 96 m
Guns: 4C + 10D* + 13*.
Armour: b-c.
Sea speed: 15 kts.

The book series was successful, as it not only catered for those interested in naval matters, but it was organised to assist naval officers on the bridge of a ship in ship recognition. The Admiralty ordered thousands of copies per year for use on board ships and various shore establishments. The early versions of his fighting ships contained the wargaming rules, but in 1912 Messrs Sampson, Low, Marston & Co. Ltd, of London, published How to Play the Naval War Game by Fred T. Jane.

Boxed sets of ships were sold for those who did not want to build their own. Twelve ships and three destroyers sold for £3 3s and thirty ships and ten destroyers for £8 8s.

Fred Jane died in Southsea, Portsmouth, England in 1916, but he had established a company that has become dominant in provided recognition guides and detailed profiles of every type of military equipment. The naval wargame launched he company.

The classic book on Fred Jane was written by Richard Brooks for the Jane's company, but is almost unobtainable.