Tales from the Vienna Woods

White Ensign/Rising Sun

Reviewed by Markus Stumptner

This is a Moments in History game on Nagumo's raid into the Indian Ocean early in 1942, by Jack Greene. In general, it is a typical double blind carrier game. Good-looking, with some interesting chrome (e.g., a rule that shows the high rate at which destroyers gulped fuel and had to be refilled), as well as that always refreshing feature, hidden victory conditions which keep your opponent in the dark about what you're really aiming for in the game. The game covers eight hours per turn, a surprisingly long time scale for a carrier game, obviously chosen to allow playing the whole operation which took about two weeks in all. There was an amazing amount of small typos and slips in the rules and setups (such as counters and markers being referred to by wrong names), but with the errata we got through that allright. Now, as most people know, the situation depicted in the game is not really balanced as the Japanese bear down on British India with all their polished carrier power against some much smaller British carriers and generally inferior land-based air. So it's a challenge for the British.

That much we knew. Unfortunately it's even more one-sided since the victory conditions treat both sides near equally in terms of victory points granted for damage caused, and only the Japanese have those nice vulnerable enemy land bases as targets. On the other hand while the Japanese are bombing the vulnerable bases they're busy and the British may get a chance to hit them from offside in true Midway fashion (we thought). Much is generally made of the fact that the British have radar equipped Swordfish torpedo bombers. I don't know how they're handled in other games. In this one the radar allows them to fly at night, but not to search, and no other planes can search at night. So the only way to use them is if a British task force stumbled into the Japanese this turn, or if one sends them to any random hex blindly. Anyway, we decided to just see if that situation would come about and played. And we soon found that there really was one big problem.

The British couldn't find the Japanese. Even after the Japanese had sailed near Ceylon for days, we had one single accidental discovery of Japanese ships but the British did not manage to retain contact. At first, that did not seem so bad since in fact the Japanese proved just as unable to find the British ships. The ocean seemed just too large. Unfortunately the victory conditions give the Japanese a fixed target that they don't have to look for - the British bases. So if the Japanese just bomb the British bases a few times they are effectively guaranteed a win, and that's what happened. We used the optional rule that gave the British a couple of extra hexes to search and they did indeed find a task force not far away, but by the next turn the seas were again blank and empty. Eventually we conceded the great carrier battle wouldn't happen even if both sides tried, basically gave up playing the game, and looked at the search effects. We soon noted that any carrier task force you have detected on one turn can be in one of 37 hexes on the next turn without exerting itself much (8 hour turns make for lots of movement). But there is no chance of even covering a major fraction of those with your search planes - the British can at best send out perhaps a meagre dozen search planes which means a dozen hexes covered per turn - but most of these planes cannot reach major parts of the map, so it's even more restrictive than the sheer number of hexes searched may indicate. At this point we began to suspect that air search (which means you fly your search planes hundreds of miles every 8-hour turn to inspect the one hex they end up in!) was the source of the problem.

The verdict for WE/RS was: game broken, but fixable. In what manner it's broken, and how one can fix it, will become startlingly clear in the next article.

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© Copyright 2001 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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