Greater East Asia War
World at War
number six, scheduled to ship in June 2009, will have the following
feature articles: “The Great East Asia War”; “Hungary in World War II”;
“The Air War Over Libya”; and “Slovakia in World War II.”
The wargame featured in that issue will be Joseph Miranda’s Greater East Asia War, which uses the much-liked system he pioneered in his earlier Twilight of the Ottomans: World War I in the Middle East design in Strategy & Tactics magazine.
Greater East Asia War
(GEAW) is a two-player, intermediate-complexity, strategic-level
simulation of the World War II campaigns waged across China and
Southeast Asia.
Each
hex on the 34x22” map represents 74.5 miles (120 kilometers) from side
to opposite side. The map extends from Korea and Manchuria in the north
to Indonesia in the south, to the Ganges River delta and Mongolia on
the west. Each game turn represents three months. Units of maneuver are
corps, armies, divisions and brigades, and they’re presented in the
form of 176 large-size, NATO-style counters, with the following types
represented: infantry, light infantry, garrison, armor, mechanized,
marines, airborne, special operations, cavalry, fortress, headquarters,
tactical airbases, strategic airbases, supply, naval bombardment task
forces, carrier task forces, and amphibious task forces.
The
concept of “victory points” (VP) is central to play of the game.
Players begin each scenario with a designated number of them. They
expend them to gain reinforcements and carry out actions. They gain new
VP as a result of achieving objectives; they lose VP when they lose
units in combat. To win the game you must have more VP than your
opponent; so play becomes a balancing act between expending VP and
attaining objectives.
There
are 12,446 words in the game’s basic rules, and another 10,886 in the
optionals (which will only be presented in the on-line eRules). That
means two experienced players can complete the shortest of the game’s
three scenarios in about six hours. The game has been designed with
two-player play primarily in mind, but solitaire play is doable.
Other Articles:
- The Greater East Asia War: A Strategic Analysis
- Joachim von Ribbentrop: Imbecile or Foreign Policy Colossus?
- Naval Strategy in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations 1939-45
- Med War Post-Mortem
- Skorzeny Strikes: Coup in Budapest, 1944