"Pearl Harbor, 1941, gaming ?" Topic

Anyone wargaming Pearl Harbor today?

Either using board games or minis ?

If you are Japanese, go for the Neosho. Never mind the battleships, get her fully laden and the US Pacific Fleet is in big trouble.

Not today unfortunately. My best experience with a game based on PH was a GQ1/2 mini-campaign I was part of MANY years ago. The premise was the Japanese decided to detach Hiei and Kirishima to bombard the tank farm the next day. I commanded the IJN, and I managed to arrive off the harbor mouth at dawn on 8 Dec undetected, and shell the crap out of the tank farm without damage to my ships. I then cagily withdrew NW as I was pretty sure Enterprise would be further south. However, I completely forgot Lexington was coming back from Midway, so in the end it didn't work out so well for me…

Years ago at a con a guy ran a "Pearl Harbor" game in 1/2400. He had recreated Pearl Harbor, had all the ships there and ran the game over the course of the convention.

You gave him a quarter (.25 cents) to play, like a video game.

That allowed you to take either 4 Kate torpedo planes, 5 Val dive bombers or 5 level bombers. He had a sheet showing how many of each plane group were still available per attack wave. The level of AA and opposition increased from 1st to 2nd wave and you could lose planes going in on your attack run.

The player then had full choice of which ships to attack, you received points for damage caused and bonus if your attack sunk the ship.

When he shut down the game, he went to the top 3 players and gave them cash prizes based upon how many quarters he had gotten during the game.

Seeing how the damage was just a raw number and not rated to the type of target (ie battleship worth more than a destoryer) and a bonus to sinking the ship, I took 4 Kate torpedo planes and attacked the hospital ship, USS Solace.

Easy target (size mattered, larger targets easy to hit)
No armor (warships could shake off damage due to protection)
Not moving (at anchor and all alone)
No AA fire (that hospital thing)

Now, you might think that attacking a hospital ship is a bit…..low….but, I did sink it and the western press would have claimed the Japanese attacked a hospital ship anyway, so why not get the points.

Also put a couple of fish into a battleship, but didn't put it down.

Great game, remember it from 30 years ago.

I playing one of my favorite solo GMT games this evening: Silent Victory: U.S. Submarines in the Pacific, 1941-45. It may be dice rolling and tables, but it tells one hell of a story.

link

Lt. Commander Stanley P. Moseley, commanding officer of the SS Pollack. We were enroute from Mare Island to Pearl when we got news of the attack on Pearl today. We will arrive in Pearl on Dec 9, get resupplied, and head out next week for our first war patrol. It will be a hard journey of 3,400 miles to Japan, but this bucket can do it. Gudgeon and Plunger will accompany us. We'll do some training in transit, but I want to save as much as possible until we hit the southern Japanese coast. The crew is nervous but ready to take on the Jap fleet. Maybe we'll hunt down and sink some of those bastards who hit us today. Let's see how they feel when we starting hunting off *their* coast!

(BTW last year at this time I took out Plunger for patrol, which was an amazing nail-biter. This year it's Pollack.)

I have never been inclined to game this as it is by nature a set up for the Japanese. Perhaps if you were to allow a US carrier to be returning and in range…

I remember playing it as a board game a long, long time ago. But can't remember much else.

If there was a good and realistic game available it would be interesting to game it out with various options depending on how much warning the Americans have. The base-line would be the historical situation with no warning. Then give the Americans a half hour, one hour, 2 hours, etc. warning and see what the differences are.

Yes, other optional scenarios would be interesting, as well …

I think this is the only way to make it a game you could replay, sounds like a great idea.

One of the things that would make it difficult to game is the degree of vulnerability. Most naval games make a lot of implicit assumptions in their assignment of survivability metrics to ships: crews at action stations, ammunition ready, inflammable materials jettisoned, magazine doors closed, watertight integrity complete, etc. Almost none of these applied at Pearl Harbor, and I suspect almost any simulation that gets repurposed would take some serious work to unspool those assumptions.

Perhaps the most interesting way to game it would be as a single-player attack, with strict time limits, with virtually everything about the US side determined by die rolls for activation and random events. It would be hard for me to think of a system that would capture the sheer range of contingencies involved in the US side.