Terry Sirk has an assortment of 20mm Airfix and other WW II figures, and he set up, for solo play, a campaign placed in China, 1944, with the following three 'fronts', i.e., areas of activity: Front Japanese Forces Allies North China Front Reg Army Chinese Commies China Proper Reg Army Nationalists Burma Reg Army British If set up in full scale, this could, in effect, use 6 players... one to run the forces of each side in each area. Terry's map had the fronts marked on it, and, according to the road system, units could transfer from front to front. For the most part, however, they were too busy fighting their own battles, trying to achieve their goals. These were: Japanese Just beat the heck out of everyone. Chinese Commies Want both Japanese and Nationalists to lose. Chinese Nationalists Beat the Japanese British Keep Burma and the Burma Road open. For each force, Terry assigned battle groups... he didn't designate what each group represented, but he did assign each group its fire power in terms of the number of 10-sided dice it tossed, wherein a toss of 1,2,3 was termed a hit. The Japanese were given about 15 battle groups, most of them tossing 6 dice. Two of them were slightly more powerful... they tossed 7 dice. The Chinese forces had 16 groups, but most of these were defined as infantry, tossing only 2 dice each. There was also a sprinkling of airbases and aircraft... each plane tossed 3 dice, as did the anti-aircraft units. Terry also allocated some guerrilla units for each side as harassing forces, tossing one die each. Each force set up a supply base and received supply points, ammunition points, and manpower points. There were rules for storage and redistribution of the supply points... for example, any ammo points the British didn't use in Burma could be sent to assist the Nationalists. Manpower points could be used to 'repair', i.e., build up units. Two other interesting additions were (a) what were deemed as 'hospital units'... here, one hit out of every 4 hits on a battle group were stored and could be used to return men to the field after a proper interval, and (b) the use of B-29's based in China for the Nationalists. These aircraft, the B-29's, could only be supplied with ammunition if the British kept the Burma Road open. Terry's closing comments: ... all in all the book work was a little much for one person, but ideally this game should be played with 6 people... after coming up with some abstract rules based on a real war, and inventing an abstract game to reflect a real campaign... I somehow managed to recreate history. The results matched closely what really happened in 1944, and if I didn't know any better, I might congratulate myself. Back to PW Review October 1998 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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