What do you do with a lot of 1/4 -inch-thick plywood sheets lying around the basement? The answer… take your bandsaw, and carve out a series of interlocking sheets, jigsaw style, each piece about a foot square. Then divide the sheets into areas - called provinces - each area around 6-inches-square. Due to the jigsaw configuration of the sheets, they can be put together in many ways, the jigsaw patterns interlocking to form a fairly stable map. One Saturday, I set up a number of the sheets on one half of the ping-pong table… this represented an island, ripe for invasion by 6mm-size troops. The island had 6 key towns, 2 airfields, a number of coastal guns, and some 5 armies to defend the motherland. All armies were composed of 5 tokens… five 6mm tankies… while I can see toying with 6mm tanks and such, I have an aversion to 6mm infantry… they're just too small. The half of the table facing the island contained the invading force… 2 carriers, and a bunch of supporting warships and transports. The transports held a total of 8 armies… once they were ashore, it would be hard times for the defenders. Bill Rankin and Brian Dewitt handled the invading forces… I defended the island. Both sides immediately called upon their air forces to strike the first blow. The invaders had 12 flights of aircraft (each flight was represented by a single token), while my defenders had only 9. In a sense, I was outgunned and outflown… my only hope was to smash and bash the attacking troops before they could land. The game procedure itself was extremely basic… in essence, a table-size boardgame. To sequence movement and combat, I had drawn up a 10-card deck, composed as indicated below. A single deck was used for both sides, and cards were drawn randomly 1 card Attacking land forces move 1 card Defending land forces move 1 card Attacking sea forces move 1 card Defending sea forces move 2 cards Attacking air forces move 2 cards Defending air forces move 1 card Wild card for attackers 1 card Wild card for defenders As in most boardgames, when a card was drawn, the appropriate tokens could move 5 inches and engage in combat with any enemy tokens encountered. For example, on a 'land force' card, the armies could move 2 areas and strike at any enemy force located one area away. The chance to hit the enemy depended upon the number of tokens in the striking force… with 5 tokens, a toss of a 10-sided die of 1-to-5 would cause a hit, with a 4 token army, a toss of 1-to-4 would cause a hit and so on. Each hit on a land army removed one token. Ships and aircraft were treated a wee bit differently. Eah ship and each aircraft were tracked… 5 hits removed the token from the field. With 2 cards in the deck for each of the 2 opposing air forces, and with planes moving forward at 5 inches per card, the 2 opposing air forces, moving toward each other at a relative speed of 20 inches per turn, soon met in mid ocean. I had been a wee bit slow in getting my defending planes to take off. When an 'air force' card appeared, I tossed percentage dice to see how many planes could take off from my airbases. 01 to 33 3 planes take off 34 to 66 2 planes take off 67 to 100 1 plane takes off Lousy dice throws resulted, for the first couple of turns, in only one defending plane taking off from each of my 2 airbases. The attacking air force proved more efficient in getting their planes aloft from their carriers. And so I was initially outnumbered in the air. Not good for the home team. Note that the card drawing procedure results in what might be termed a "gotcha" game… as in most boardgame sequences, a side moves its tokens and attacks… the defender sits there and merely hopes to survive until it becomes his turn (draws one of his own cards) to strike back. And so, due to my initial inefficient air force response, the attacking air force was able, on each of its 'air force' cards, to surround the few planes I managed to get airborne, and focus all sotts of fire power on them. A plane could strike at an enemy plane within a range of 5 inches. Each plane tossed a 10-sided die, and a toss of 1-to-3 resulted in a hit. With the attackers ganging up on my heroic pilots at 5-to-1, my air force strength rapidly dwindled. Toss enough dice, and you're bound to come up with a 3 or less. I started out with 9 planes, and 4 of them quickly went down in smoke. One of my aircraft attacked a landing craft just coming in to shore… here, too, a toss of 1-to-3 resulted in a hit. In fact, 3 hits, since this one pilot tried to get his revenge for the sorry pasting his fellow pilots were suffering and he took it out on the poor troops in the landing craft. Each hit on a landing craft removed one of the army tokens. I had 4 other aircraft which were badly damaged. Since 5 hits destroyed a plane, and since each plane already had 3 hits on it, I thought I would try an "emergency landing" to get the planes back to base for repairs. The "emergency landing" procedure bypassed the need to actually fly back (at 5 inches per card) to the airbase. The chance of instantly whizzing back to base for the emergency landing was P = 100 - (Distance to base) - (10% for every hit on the plane) My planes had flown out to sea to engage the enemy. The air-to-air combats all occurred around 30 inches out from my airbases. Looking at the above probability, my chance of getting a plane back safely was P = 100 - 30 inches to base - (3 hits x 10% per hit) or 40 percent I tossed dice for each of my 4 badly wounded planes, trying to get under 40, and succeeded for all 4 planes! Once a plane was on the ground, I could, once each turn, knock off a damage point, in effect, repairing the plane. Of course, once half my airforce was on the ground, this gave total control of the air to the attackers. On a 'sea force' card, ships moved at 5 inches per draw. Landing craft moved twice as fast. I had thought the attacking fleet would launch its landing craft way out in mid-ocean, taking advantage of the 10-inch-per-card move of the craft. But no… the fleet moved to about 15 inches from the shores of the island before launching its landing craft. Each landing craft carried an 'army'… 5 tank tokens. The first army that landed was immediately engaged by one of mine… a slightly outnumbered 4-token army. The combat procedure was simple: a. The attacker struck first. If the number of tokens in his army was 'N', a toss of 1-to-N immediately removed one defending token. b. The defender then struck twice… he got 2 bites at the apple. c. After tokens were removed, a simple formula was used: P = 10-sided die x (Your surviving tokens) The side with the higher product won, and the loser was forced back My defensive army won, forcing back the attacking force. But since the losing army had just landed, we ruled that the entire landing army had been destroyed! In this manner, I actually destoyed 2 of the landing armies. Perhaps there was hope yet! Alas! Although the landing armies performed miserably, and I won some 4 or 5 battles, the key to success lay in the relative strengths of the air forces. Back to PW Review April 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon 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