"How do you game night Ironbottom Sound games?" Topic

I played them all with the old SPI CA game. Great fun.
But always in the back of my mind was " I know we are playing Savo Island and this is the ships I have."

So.
How do you "simulate" the hidden movement, not knowing if your routine resupply run will be interfered with, not knowing the Yanks suddenly have decent radar, not knowing the Japanese have superior night optics…

You get the idea.

Winston,
Many of these things changed over the 6 months or so this area was very active… A friend and I did 3x5 card with every known combat force that sailed into Iron Bottom sound. This was some 30+ years ago (I still have my cards tho') and we would shuffle and each side drew card from their stack. The game was run with a referee as much as possible and you never knew whether your missions would cause a contact or what you'd run into… we always had a contact and a battle…always. We even added few what ifs… You never knew what the technical capabilities of the other side were..or how big/heavy their force was. Historical flagships… this put a lot of the unknown back in those battles.

I game tested the Tassafaronga scenario back in the day. I had Tanaka's destroyers and was sunk with little ceremony. Dunnigan asked the US player if I'd screwed up. He said no. Dunnigan looked in his copy of Tanaka's "Destroyer Captain" and asked if we'd used night sighting. We had not. I assumed that the scenario was fixed. I bought the game when it was published to discover that Tanaka's people slaughtered the USN every time.

Have each side pre-plot their courses, speeds, and sailing formations in advance.

Then determine if/when the two sides (or one side) detects the other.

For a bit of tactical surprise, you can roll dice against a table, or draw cards for special events to occur. I recall the former with an older set of WWII rules, from back in the 1970s, or early 1980s. There was a listing of about 100 different modifiers, including things like: superior visual spotting, superior radar, increases/decreases to effective vessel tonnage/hull points, increases in torpedo range, differing torpedo dud rates, better/worse torpedo warhead effectiveness, better/worse than average gunnery fire control, etc.

You could choose to roll one, or several modifiers for each scenario, to make things "interesting" (perhaps three for each side), just to keep the battles like new engagements, instead of knowing the other sides' tactical capabilities, and warship strengths/weaknesses in advance (intel is never perfect, until after the war).

Mako: I think that game was "Battlestations" by Alan Zimm.

GQ3 has in their site a very clever mapless campaign that gets you in it very well.
Now the actual fight, dummies and some sort of orders and control system to try and limit your control and instill a bit of mess. As usual it cannot be perfectbut should also not kill your fun.
One day when I do my site I'll put my system in it.

"One day.." the bane of all gamers…

No. It should be done around october / november. But I'll have to chase out every bit of GQ3 as the owners want to keep their product to themselves, pristine of others input.

You really need a referee to do justice to this idea. Having the players plot their moves in advance is also important.

That does sound right.

Thanks for the reminder.

I used to own a boardgame called Tokyo Express. It's a solitaire game where you are the American force and the game randomly generates a Japanese force. Sometimes you spot them first, sometimes they slam you with torpedoes before you see anything.

link

stephen