Marcus Young ran a very enjoyable PBEM Matrix Game about the whole of WWII in the Pacific. The game lasted four turns covering the first six months of the war. The result was a Allied victory but not from the traditional causes. The game was engrossing to play. I blame it, in part for by energy slump. After such a great effort – what can follow but rest? All of which tells me it is a good game and should be replayed! MARCUS' METHODS One thing intriguing about Marcus' game is how he ran it. I will try to summarize it. SCALE: There were three players to a side. We each technically commanded an entire theater of operation (I got the Southern Front for the Japanese). Turn lasted two months so arguments were absolutely not the small scale, step by step actions that they have been in previous games. ARGUMENTS We players did not realize this large scaleness very well at first. Some of our early arguments were small scale and failed to reflect the great sweeping scale of the whole war. Soon we picked up on this. We found that a single argument could trigger a whole sequence of conflicts. The outcome of which would be settled by a second round of conflict arguments. REFEREE EXPLANATION Marcus very keenly explained all his argument strength rulings. I personally don't do that (probably because I'm lazy). The players seemed to like this action on Marcus' part. It certainly is a good practice to do. (But I'm still lazy!) BATTLES Our arguments triggered strings of conflict arguments. Marcus would call on those involved to make conflict resolution arguments. He then resolved then as strings of logic. If an argument triggered two conflicts – say a sea battle followed by a beech head invasion – he would resolve the sea battle first and then move on to the land battle only if the attacker won the first attack. A very good method. Very logical. LENGTH OF ARGUMENTS We players soon began writing book length arguments with sometimes suicidally ambitious plans. They proved too much for me to keep up with (In my abortive experiment to post the results on a web page). What the length allowed was for the players to be very creative in their moves. WHAT HAPPENED? You will note that I left this to last. Why? Because I caused my side to lose!!! We bravely invaded the Phillipines and won. Only to pull out our troops to invade Malaysia. We did this because the American Player (Joe Nixon) had succeeded in arguing that he would get two arguments a turn for the Phillipines. We were not going to win here! Meanwhile the fleet won the our own version of Midway – so the US fleet was unlikely to be a threat for a while. We knew we had to knock out one of our opponents (Britain, Australia or the US). Circumstances lead us to make a play for Britain. This meant India. We tried twice to launch invasions of the sub continent but failed both times. The last attempt lead to a naval battle off Southern India which was a complete disaster for the Japanese. We decided that we were defeated and opted to make peace now (while we still had a strong army and navy and lots of land to deal away) rather than go down fighting. Obviously we players are not samurai! THREE CHEERS FOR MARCUS!!! HIP, HIP, HUZZAH! Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #25 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Chris Engle. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com