Stripped Down for Parts: Port Arthur

 

Charles S. Roberts Award 2024 nominee for Best New Edition of a Previously Published Game

 

Port Arthur (Nuts! Publishing, 2024) is the second release in French game company Nuts! Publishing’s Combat Rations series. Both this and the first in the series, 300: Earth & Water (Nuts! Publishing, 2021 – you can read my review here) were designed by Yasushi Nakaguro and previously published in Japan by BonSai Games, as is the projected third game in the series, Guerre Éclair (Nuts! Publishing, ~2025), originally released as The Rise of Blitzkrieg: The Fall of France, 1940 (BonSai Games, 2019), is due out later this year.

Port Arthur is an asymmetric game about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. This conflict saw the defeat of the Russian Empire and the removal of its navy as a credible force on the world stage, and started the Japanese military on a road to national domination and empire building which would lead with tragic inevitability to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, and the nation’s wholesale defeat for years later. It’s a big canvas to be covered by such a small game, but 300: Earth & Water deals with successive generations of Persian rulers trying to bring a few belligerent city-states to submission (and failing each time, historically). Mr Nakaguro is adept at drawing the key threads from historical conflicts and weaving them into compelling, playable narratives.

Port Arthur shares the signature Combat Rations series magnetic clasp
clamshell enclosure. All up, it's a gorgeous package.

Like 300: Earth & Water, Port Arthur comes in a clamshell-style box, fastened with a magnetised clasp. I was a little suspicious of these when I first got 300, but the box both opens easily and secures well. It no doubt helps that the materiel of the game collectively doesn’t weigh too much. The box is roughly the size of a fat B5 envelope, or a 280-page Picador paperback (or a bit shorter than a VHS cassette case), so they’ll slip easily into a briefcase or backpack for a traveling game.

The artwork for the whole package was provided by game artist, Maud Chalmel. Ms Chalmel is an accomplished illustrator in the area of family games, but I believe this her first venture into wargaming. Some people have talked about Port Arthur having a cartoonish quality to the artwork – a view get if based on the box-cover alone – but taken as a whole this description does the work justice. Ms Chalmel brings to every aspect of the game an art-nouveau quality that is both historically appropriate - it was popular in fin de siècle Europe and elsewhere and itself references the influence of the Ukiyo-e tradition. The result feels appropriate for the subject, and the whole effect is really quite stunning.

The box back.

Thew back of the box is less forthcoming about the game than I would have expected. It begins with a paragraph referencing the key events of the Russo-Japanese War – the invasion of Korea and the battles of Mukden (on land) and Tsushima (at sea), and the subsequent destruction of Russia’s Baltic Fleet. The box-back also lets us know that this is meant to be a two-player game for players fourteen and up, and that the playing time should clock in at around 40 or so minutes.

The rulebook - sixteen pages of full-colour goodness (about fourteen pages
of rules, including illustrations).

The rulebook for Port Arthur has been printed on a good weight of a higher gloss paper (the kind more commonly seen in Euro-games) and runs to just sixteen pages. I am still going through the rules but, so far, the English translation is solid (unlike a lot of European publishers, Nuts! tends to print separate copies in French and English), and I don’t anticipate any difficulties getting the game to the table, barring the usual time and opponent-availability issues.

The mounted map. Lush.

The board is gorgeous. It might well be one of my favourite game boards for its appearance. Like 300, it is a small, for panel – A3 paper sheet-sized – mounted board, covering Japan, the Korean Peninsula, China, Manchuria, and Russia, with the surrounding waters divided into sea areas, and holding boxes for the ports of Vladivostok, Port Arthur, and Diego Suarez. Movement is regulated by point-to-point locations on land, and by area movement for sea-borne ships.

Along the left edge of the board is the game’s scoring track. Like 300, the game scores on a pendulum track, beginning at zero, and scoring at the end of each turn. Unlike 300, there is no sudden death victory if a side reaches the maximum points (five) – the game plays out for the full six turns. At the end of the game, Japan has to have points on their side of the scoring track, and maintain control of Mukden to gain a win, otherwise its an automatic win for the Russians.

Two A5 punchboards. The counters come out cleanly - no sanding.

The counters are pre-rounded easy-punch pieces printed on a heavy weight grey-core cardstock. The majority of the counters represent the ships of the Russian and Japanese fleets, but game markers and a turn track are also included in the mix. There is also a Port Arthur Blockade marker that gets placed n the board when the Japanese player manages to restrict navigation to and from the port (the actual locations of Vladivostok and Port Arthur on the map are indicated by colour-coded anchor symbols linking the holding boxes to their geographical position.

As with everything else, the counters and markers just look really good. The ship counters are rectangular and feature a full-strength side on the front and a damaged side with a slightly greyed-out image on the back. The Russo-Japanese War was rough on the Russian navy, which ended up loosing the bulk of not one, but two fleets.

Player Aid Card. Small but useful.

Port Arthur comes with a single, double-sided Player Aid Card, printed on a really light cardstock. The front offers set-up notes and an annotated Sequence of Play, while the verso presents further notes for conducting sorties and naval operations, and naval battles. Two PACs would have been nice, but a lot of games deliver a single

Dice and meeples.

The game also comes with six dice and six Japanese soldier and officer meeples. The dice are on the smaller side, but that’s fine in a travel-size game. The meeples are used to mark locations on the Manchuria land-track where the Japanese player has conducted successful attacks. I get that fancy meeples (these do look very cool) are a selling point for some, and Nuts! Publishing is a business with a reasonably large footprint in the family game market as well, but for my money I would have been happy with wooden cubes or discs as markers. This by no means detracts from the game, I just don’t think it will add all that much to my experience of it.

The box interior art; a really nice finishing touch to an all-round attractive game. 

The box interior art found in Port Arthur is one of those strictly unnecessary but really nice details that Nuts! Publications often squeeze into their publications. While it doesn’t add anything to gameplay, it The enclosure is styled as an occasional box for keeping photos and other mementos that might be kept by an operational officer to remind him of home. It’s thoughtful and eloquent, a reminder of the humanity of those involved at the very outset of one of the most inhumane periods of modern history.

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So, that’s Port Arthur. Add one more title to my TBP list. I would like to get an AAR posted in the next month or two, but I really can’t promise that. It does look like an interesting and challenging game though, and with a play-time of about three quarters of an hour, it’s definitely a contender for a weeknight turn