Overthinking it: Tarawa 1943 and intent in game design

 

Just before Christmas, a copy of Tarawa 1943 (Worthington Publishing, 2021) arrived from a friendly game store the next state over. It’s a small, contained game – nearly everything fits onto the 17”x22” mounted board. It plays very quickly once you get the hang of it, and it is frustratingly challenging, but in the way that makes you want to set it up again for a rematch as soon a you’ve finished your last game. I must have played it now at least twenty times over a period of two-or-so months; I have yet to completely clear the island of Japanese forces, but each time I come back to it, Tarawa feels like a fresh challenge and something that is achievable with some planning and a little sympathy from the dice gods.

Tarawa 1943 - initial set up

The game comes with a handy score pad, a booklet now common in Worthington games, that will allow you to record your game results over time. The score-pad is designed to make it easy to work out how well you did in your game in terms of Victory Points, based on the number of locations seized, the number of Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) blocks still on the board, and the number of US Maine units lost in taking the island.

In all the times I’ve played, I haven’t once used the score-pad to check whether I had achieved a technical victory based on points. Personally, I’ve always felt that a anything less than a complete clearing of the island and securing of all locations by the time the 30-card IJA deck has played out is a kind of failure. And so, I would reset the game and try again (it’s a testament to the brilliant design and playability of Tarawa 1943 that over 20+ plays, it hasn’t got old).

Can't seem to shift that last bunker.

I’d been happily playing Tarawa this way right up until I watched a playthrough video posted on YouTube by Grant from the Players’ Aid. I’d advise anyone interested in Tarawa 1943 to go watch this; it’s better than any review I’ve read or seen at conveying the tension and pleasure of playing the game. After a brief run-through of how to play, Grant proceeds to play an entire game, falling just short of complete conquest of the island (at this point, I could sympathise). Then, using the score-pad, he went through the steps for allocation of victory points, taking several minutes over it before reaching his conclusion.

Watching Grant go through this process affected me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I had always ignored the victory points tally, but it struck me for the first time that this wasn’t just an additional feature but was incorporated as an integral part of the game experience. I’d been playing the game to my own satisfaction, but not as the designers had intended it to be played. I’d been doing it wrong.

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On reflection, I realise I haven’t played Tarawa since I watched Grant play it right though with the scoring at the end. I realised I wasn’t playing the game the way it was intended to be played, and I think I felt guilty for not abiding by the designers’ intent. Am I being too sensitive? Is it disrespectful or just plain wrong to play and enjoy a game in a way it wasn’t ever meant to be played?

You could argue that it comes down to respect for the game and rules as published. In the case of Tarawa 1943, I’m either simply ignoring was the designers of the game thought was a worthwhile, or I’m making a conscious decision to ignore any kind of qualified victory and recognise only a complete dismissal of the IJA forces by the attacking US Marines as a true victory.

This is where we start to get into the tall grass of “house rules.” I’m much more familiar with this in roleplaying games and any boardgame, but especially not wargames. RPGs are often designed with closer attention to style than design, and some finagling is sometimes required at the table to ensure playability and the satisfaction of all. I’ve heard of this happening in wargames but have never done it myself (well, I thought I’d never done it).

Looking back, though, I realise I do have something of a history of straight-out ignoring some rules or factors of wargames. The example that most readily springs to mind is Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010). My brother-in-law have played a lot of C&C, mostly Napoleonics. There is a thing in Naps where, if your infantry unit is attacked by a cavalry unit, you can declare that the unit will form square. This doesn’t prevent the attack, but it limits the potential damage to the unit (a single dice), at the price of a random command card from your hand, which is placed on a special board, face down, and returned to your hand when the unit breaks square.

France's neglected Square markers.

We would always set up the square boards and markers each game until we realised that we both had decide independently that the loss of a manoeuvre option (the sacrificed card) was – usually – a greater risk than the loss of a single unit, and that forming square will generally slow the game down, always an undesirable eventuality. This is a case where a decision has been made to give expedience more weight than historical accuracy, but it’s something that we have both tacitly agreed to within the contract of the (our) game.

I’m not sure why seeing how Tarawa was meant to be evaluated set me off like it did. I wrote the first half of this piece the week I started keeping this blog. It’s taken me the better part of four months to complete it. The idea of designer intent has been running around in my head all this time; I keep stumbling across unusual little instances of a game where someone has added quirky rules – some optional, some mandatory – to add some verisimilitude to the situation. Richard Berg was a big one for this. That’s something different from but adjacent to what I've been talking about here, and I think it’s something I’ll come back to sometime.

I’ve also been meaning to write a review of Tarawa 1943 (spoiler alert: I like it), but this piece has been hanging over me the whole time. And I still can’t say whether I’m happy to go back and play Tarawa again the way I always have or not. I think I felt like I was somehow showing disrespect to Grant and Mike Wylie by not playing it through to the scoring stage, the way they had intended. I suspect that, having sold me a copy of their game, they wouldn’t really care one way or another.

So, after a break of three months or more, I think the best course is to take Tarawa off the shelf, play it again five or eight times, maybe use the scoring pad just to track how much or little I lost by, and write that review. It’s a really good game and it deserves that much.