Our club is know as the South Jersey Confederation of Wargamers for a reason. There are several groups within the club that meet for games and then all get together for Game Days and conventions. Lately there have been three hot saturday night gaming spots. Ted’s home in Ocean City is the place of choice for board games that often run for several weeks. Phil’s house in English Creek is the sci-fi headquarters. Down here in the south we prefer smaller miniatures games that end in 3-4 hours, with the main battle areas being my house in N. Wildwood, and Tom Gallagher’s place. At the Sept. Game Day Ted invited me to join a Gettysburg game at his house. Since I had never had the pleasure of gaming at Chez Poltorak I jumped at the chance.

After arriving in Ocean City and being mauled by two very large and very friendly dogs I made it to Ted’s gaming area on the back porch. Unfortunately a few cancellations put the kibosh on the Gettysburg game, but Ted had a Plan B. Ted, Rob McBride and I played a naval board game of Iron Bottoms set near Guadalcanal. Rob and I were the Japanese and Ted played the Americans. The objective was simple: sink the enemy. The Americans had four destroyers and two battleships. The Japanese had a larger fleet made up of destroyers, light cruisers, and a battlecruiser. Our plan was for me to take our initial force of destroyers and a light cruiser to demolish the American destroyers while Robbie used our reinforcements to take on the battleships.

I found myself thorough out maneuvered by Ted. The low point came when he managed to put all four of his destroyers at point blank range against just one of my destroyers, the rest being woefully out of position. Despite my blunders and Ted’s hot dice I was faring pretty well until a critical hit caused my best ship, the Sendai, to explode and sink. Up in the north Rob had all he could handle fighting the battleships. We managed to rally somewhat as I got the hang of moving my ships and firing torpedoes and Robbie brought our heavier ships into range. The hero of the Japanese fleet was the little Shikinami, which managed to sink one American destroyer with a torpedo, and followed it up by ramming the Preston then sinking her at point blank range.

Robbie had a chance to win the game for us when he managed to box in the battleships next to an island and had several chances to get one with his torpedoes, but the dice wouldn’t cooperate. The game was concluded in about four hours. A tabulation of victory points put Ted ahead by nine points, a decisive victory. I have never been a fan of naval games, or board games, so I was surprised to find that I had a good time playing this naval board game. I can see the advantages to playing this type of wargare as a boardgame. The hexes make movements and turnng easy.

The rules have a nice way of handling torpedoes that doesn’t require a calculator. Using small ship models in place of the cardboard counters wouldn’t add anything to the game, in my opinion. If you used some nice big ship models you would need too much table space to make the game practical. Hopefully Ted will run the game at a Game Day so you can try it himself.