Stripped Down for Parts: Pacific Tide: The United States vs Japan, 1941-45

 

 

It seems like everyone is having a sale. After going a little harder than I’d intended on the GMT sale (more unboxings to come), I heard the siren song of Compass Games’ annual sale calling to me and found I could not resist. What sealed the deal was a request from a friend to secure a game for Christmas for his son, which halved the postage cost. How could I say no?

I was leaning toward Imperial Tide: the Great War, 1914-1918 (Compass Games, 2022). This is a two-player card-driven game covering the entire European theatre of the First World War and has been described by some uncharitable or less-imaginative folk as PoG-Lite (in reference to Ted Racier’s enduring classic, Paths of Glory (GMT Games, 1999), now in its sixth printing. But I’ve read that the Tide system is a bit of a departure in its design philosophy and that the best way in was through its origin games, so I thought that's where I should start. At least, that was the plan.

I didn’t realise when I ordered it that Pacific Tide: The United States versus Japan, 1941-45 (Compass Games, 2019) was actually the second Card-Driven Game (CDG) designed using an innovative card purchase system. The designer, Gregory M. Smith, mentions in his designer notes that Mitchell Ledford first came up with the card-purchase mechanic for his game, Ostkrieg: WWII Eastern Front (Compass Games, 2020), which Smith also worked on, but due to Compass’s prodigious development pipeline, Pacific Tide happened to beat Ostkrieg to release. So Pacific Tide was, indeed, the first card-purchase CDG to hit the stores by a few months. You can understand the confusion.

Pacific Tide comes in a sturdy 1” deep box, which surprised me a little. I don’t resent it being in such a slim package – that’s another inch of shelf-space to go toward something else – and there really isn’t any reason for a deeper box in this instance. The game doesn’t come with a travel insert.

Once punched, everything fits with the counters and dice divvied up into the bags provided, and I suspect you could even squeeze a GMT counter tray in there with the board, rules and PACs, though I haven’t experimented with this. (but definitely not a DVG deep-dish tray).

I really appreciate the sheer volume of information conveyed on the back of a Compass Games game-box. They have a fairly standardised display of information pertaining to both the parameters of the game (rule complexity, turn, map, and unit scale), as well as average game duration, solitaire suitability (sometimes with explanatory notes, like "no hidden movement"), numbers of players and a very realistic age recommendation.

The rules for Pacific Tide were the hardest part of the package for me to come at, in the beginning. Cutting my teeth on SPI’s procedural delivery of rules, that’s what I tend to expect from a wargame. The rules to Pacific Tide are a departure from what I’m used to seeing in a rules-set. Everything you need to know is there, and in a natural format, one thing leading logically from the last. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I think it’s that there’s a measure of informality to the rules and I found jarring, but at the same time, conveyed everything I needed to understand how the game worked and why things happen in a certain way. This is a good rules-set; everything is conveyed simply and understandably. I think my OCD would like to see more subheadings.

While the rules book is a scant sixteen pages in length, this includes a representation of counters, front and back, and the brief but very informative Designer's Notes. The actual rules make up just eleven pages, with liberal use of illustrations to convey concepts used in the game. This should be an easy game to teach.

The gameboard for Pacific Tide is a mounted 17” by 22” space encompassing the whole Pacific theatre using a point-to-point location system. A spider-web of linking rods connect tangible locations like Truk, Okinawa, Hawai’i and the Marshall Islands, and less tangible ocean spaces. All the locations are both labelled and numbered, with the open ocean positions labelled with the blue background. This is a handy visual reminder; at the end of a round (one calendar year of game time) ships cannot be located in the open ocean. Any that cannot make it to a safe anchorage in their final movement are lost.

The board is simple and utilitarian, but nonetheless quite attractive. It’s a nice board to play on. I really like the almost watercolour-rendered style of the ocean and land-masses. Location labels and other directive materials are all clear

Pacific Tide makes do with a single sheet of half-inch counters. The units represented are fleet ships, carriers, land- and carrier-based air units, and army/marine units. On the face of it, this might seem too abstracted to make for a satisfying play experience, but in the context of how the game plays out, it works remarkably well. All the units have a numerical rating of one to five. These represent the number of units in attendance at a particular point.

Most locations have a limit of five of any land-based unit at a location, while some of the smaller islands have much smaller limits. You can use a fleet ship 5 marker to represent the size of a force at a particular location, or you can make change, swapping the 5 for a 2 and a 3 if you want to split your forces in a move action. I’ll admit, it wasn’t exactly intuitive to begin with, but as soon as I wrapped my cotton-filled grognard head around the concept, it became the most natural thing to consolidate or divide forces, but for stack management, and prospectively to hide your intentions from your opponent.

Some might take issue with the position of the Australian locations on the map. Brisbane is just about right, but Fremantle (Perth’s port, and a significant harbour for submarine operations during the war) seems to have been geographically confused with Broome. I’m just grateful Australia was featured at all. In fact – and this was done purely as a stylistic choice on Smith’s part – British and Australian control markers are included in the mix, as are Commonwealth ships and troops, which is kind of cool.

Other counters (apart from the aforementioned location Control counters) include reminder markers for the attitude of the “bot” in solo mode (from year to year, the solo player rolls for the attitude of the game’s AI, which can behave in an Aggressive, Moderate or Defensive posture, and Movement reminder markers (three in all).

Sorry, I should have photographed them on a sheet of paper.

There are two 24-card decks in Pacific Tide, one each for the Allies and the Japanese, and each deck is divided into separate years, starting with 1941, and going through to 1945. The cards are the engine of the game. A year-turn ends when both players have either passed or have no more cards to play (which forces them to pass, I guess). Because the history covers so little of 1941, there are only a couple of cards for each layer for that year (the first truncated turn, which always begins with the Japanese player attacking Pearl Harbor).

The majority of the cards are made available in 1942. 1943 and the subsequent turns is where it gets (mechanically) interesting. Along with a lesser number of year-cards, the players each have a number of points to “buy” previously played cards. From 1842 on, each players selection for that year is shuffled, then split into two. You ply out all the cards in the first half of your “hand” before picking up the second half. You may have a pretty good idea of what cards you have to play, but until you pick up that first half-hand, you won’t know what you’ll have to play when. At the scale of the game, it makes for a good approximation of the fog of war.

The Player Aid Cards – there are two identical cards included – Are good, but maybe not as good as they could have been. On one side is pretty much everything you need to know as a player for the two-player game. It has a Sequence of Play, a short Summary of Key Points, and a brain dump of procedures and rules exceptions, all printed on a background of the CV photograph from the box cover. It’s all useful information at the table, but I feel like a little more care in the presentation could have made it a really great PAC.

On the reverse side are the guidelines for the solo bot. This is actually a work of genius. It’s a simple approach to what can be a difficult tool to get right. At the start of each year, you role for the posture of the enemy (Aggressive, Balanced, or Defensive). The cards of the two deck each feature an unobtrusive A, B or D, When playing the bot’s turn in a solo game, you draw three cards, and play the one that matches the bot’s posture that year. You still have to make some of the decisions for the opposing side, but anyone who regularly solos two-player games will be able to do this easily enough.

Sixteen dice, sealed for freshness.

The game comes with two things in abundance, dice and baggies. This is the first game I’ve bought in a while that actually came with enough baggies to separate out the counters reasonable and meaningful way. I couldn’t wait to try this out, so I punched and clipped the counter sheet the same day I took the photos for this piece, and set it up a couple of days later to get a feel for it. When I set it up, I just dumped the baggie contents into plastic dishes, and sorted out from there. It can be a little difficult finding the right numbered pieces to “make change” for the pieces, and for the sake of space, all the ships are in one pot, all the planes -land-based and carrier-based – in another, rather than sorting CVs from fleet ships for each side. My only criticism with the counters is that, with the rich, darker background colours, White may have been a better design choice for the values than black. It a minor thing, and not one I’m going to stop playing over.

Set up and ready to play.

I should apologise for dropping so much rules-related chatter into what was supposed to be a standard unboxing. I normally try to keep that kind of thing for the review, so some inevitably bleeds into my game-play reports as well. The more I read of the rules and the more I looked at the game, the keener I was to get it to the table and push some counters around. I only ran through 1941 and most of 1942 in my first try out, and made a couple of mistakes. I’m hoping to get it to the table again this week, in which case, I’ll write up a sit-rep for the readers’ edification. Meanwhile, thanks for reading this far.