Stripped Down for Parts: China's War 1937-1941

 

 

At the end of last year, I won a copy of Italy ’43 (GMT Games, 2025) in a prize draw, part of Grant Linneberg’s fourth birthday celebrations of his Pushing Cardboard podcast. The only thing was, I’d just been billed for a copy of Italy (along with a couple of other games) a week earlier. I suggested to Grant that he redraw the prize, but he was reluctant to do that. Instead, he said he’d talk to GMT and see if they would swap it out for a game I didn’t have.

To cut a long story short, a replacement game arrived earlier this week and I couldn’t be happier. China’s War: 1937-1941 (GMT Games, 2025) was a preordered game I had to drop at the last minute due to budget constraints. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the COIN system, but desgner Brian Train’s second contribution to the series, Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62 (GMT Games, 2017) is my favourite in the series. That, along with an abiding interest in the subject, put China’s War on my “opportunistic purchase” list.

In 1937, Japan had already occupied Manchuria for more than five years, setting up a puppet state, Manchukuo. Throughout that time, incidents sporadically flared between the Japanese military and the Chinese National Revolutionary Army. In 1937, such an incident occurred at Wanping, roughly ten miles south-west of Beijing, involving a missing Japanese soldier. The situation escalated quickly, and the event came to be known as the Marco Polo Bridge incident. Some historians point to this event as the true beginning of the Second World War, but most agree it was the starting point of the Second Sino-Japanese War. It’s this conflict that the game covers.

The box cover makes a bold, no-nonsense statement about what to expect. The picture captures so many aspects of the conflict in a single image. It shows members of the Eight Route Army – on paper a part of the National Revolutionary Army (the Nationalist military, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek) – readying for battle with Japanese forces along the Great Wall of China. The unit was a product of the Second United Front, the alliance of convenience between the Kuomintang (the central Nationalist military command) and the Chinese Communist Party, but while nominally part of the NRA, the Eighth Route Army was separate to the Kuomintang, taking orders directly from the CCP. China’s War could not have a more appropriate cover illustration.

Along with a reproduction of the game map, sample cards, and counters, the box back offers a brief note on the historical context and scope of the game, and places is in the broader framework of the COIN series. The playability graphics tell us the game is intended for players 16 and up (this is more legalistic for a COIN game, I think, than the usual 14+), that it can accommodate one to four players (and features a dedicated solitaire system), and that the game should play out inside of four hours. The Complexity rating it five out of nine (I would be inclined to nudge that up a notch) and the solitaire playability is rated at a full nine, due to the bespoke solitaire system included.

The Rulebook. As always, all forthcoming pictures come with the boilerplate apology
 for the shoddy, underlit, David Fincher-esque photography.  

GMT have seemed to standardise their booklet printing in recent times, though that could just be an artifact of the types of games I buy from them. All the GMT games I’ve purchased in the last year or two have had the same (very good) quality matt paper stock across rulebooks and any additional booklets, and China’s War is no exception.

Rulebook - sample spread.

The Rulebook is 24 pages in length. The rules are clear and readable and well laid out, with lots of box-text Design (beige) and Play (blue) Notes. The rules themselves cover just fourteen pages. The remaining pages are given over to the scenarios (five pages, which include a shot column of Optional Rules, a two-page Key Terms Index, a reproduction of the counter sheet, and Cover/Table of Contents page. The back cover has is blank. A blank page always feels like a missed opportunity but in this case, I can’t think of anything you could fit into a single page that would be of benefit to the game.

The Playbook.

The Playbook runs to twenty-eight pages and offers everything you might be looking for that didn’t make it into the Rulebook. This includes an eight-page Game Tutorial (example of play), a one-page Faction Interactions table, another single-page offering a pronunciation Guide for the unfamiliar Chinese location names and significant historical figures (including Wade-Giles and Pinyin transliterations), and eight pages of Event Tips and Background.

Playbook - sample spread (Extended example of play). All three booklets are lavishly
illustrated and full colour throughout.

A three-page historical background essay, three pages of designer notes, a one-page bibliography and list of production credits round out the booklet.

The solitaire rules guide, but you can call him Sun Wukong.

China’s War comes with a mature solitaire system. I haven’t kept up with the development of solitaire models in COIN games (my most recent is All Bridges Burning (GMT Games, 2020)), but this feels like a big step forward. The engine for the AI is a short tarot-sized card deck, which I’ll come back to later in the post.

Sun Wukong - sample spread (example of play).

The solitaire-system guidebook, which carries its title, Sun Wukong Card-Based Non-Player Rules and Reference Booklet like a mortar plate, shares its layout style with the main Rulebook. The booklet is comprised of six pages of rules (including a one-page list of important terms exclusive to Sun Wukong), Four and a half pages covering the Operations, Special Activities, and Events for the solo system, and thirteen-page Non-Player Example of Play, which will, no doubt, be crucial to understanding how the system works.

Faction Operations and Special Activities PACs. Nationalists (NRA)
and Japan, front and back.

And the Warlords and Communist Party of China (CPC), inside the fold.

The game comes with a plethora of player aids. There are four duplicate, bi-fold Player Aid Cards. Each panel offers the Operations and Special Actions options for the four factions – the Nationalists, Warlords, Communist Party of China (CPA), and Japan. These are pretty standard for COIN games and are printed on a nice weight of cardstock.

The two Propaganda (left) and General Assault Procedure PACs.

The game also comes with two duplicate single-panel PACs, covering the General Assault Procedure on one side and the Propaganda Round procedure on the reverse. You may be at odds with all the other factions, but you’ll still need to learn to share. The font is a little small for easy reading, but it has to be to keep the card’s parameters down to a single panel.

Event PAC (external - front page to the right).

Event PAC (internal).

A single Event Actions bi-fold PAC is also included in the game. This PAC covers the forty-eight separate events that appear in the Event deck and includes a procedural for dealing with Non-Player Factions during Propaganda rounds on the back.

Sun Wukong PAC (external).

Sun Wukong PAC (internal).

Finally, there is a single Sun Wukong Non-Player Aid Sheet. This PAC brings together the tables needed to run one or more NP factions through the game, including the Effective events for each faction, Piece Selection, Space Selection and Move priorities and Capability and Momentum instructions. It also features a listing of the Sun Wukong Golden Rules, so you don’t have to constantly refer back to the Rules and Reference Booklet.

The mounted game map. There's still a little lift in the seems. I usually put a couple of
other games on top for thirty minutes or so to get the mounted boards flat before
shooting, but this one was pretty good out of the box.

The game map is 22” by 34”, mounted and covers the roughly the eastern-most part of China from the coast to Yunnan and Gansu provinces. The board looks great, and references many classic COIN boards, like Andean Abyss (GMT Games, 2012) and Cuba Libre (GMT Games, 2013). The artist Matthew Wallhead has been responsible for cover-art and PAC and card artwork for several GMT games in recent years, including the most recent additions to the Levy and Campaign series, Inferno (GMT Games, 2023), Plantagenet (GMT Games, 2023), and Seljuk (GMT Games, 2025), and he was the cartographer for the sixth edition of the Pendragon RPG (Chaosium, 2024). This is his first game map for GMT. I’m keen to see what comes next from Mr Wallhead.

Twenty-two provinces are featured, varying from plains to rough terrain, and Lines of Communication are railroads and rivers. The play area is defined to the north (left) of the map is Manchukuo (Japanese-occupied Manchuria), which cannot be entered by any Chinese forces, and to the south by French-controlled Indochina, which is off-limits to all factions. As you might expect from a COIN game, the map-board also includes a Sequence of Play matrix for faction order, holding boxes for factions’ available units, Overflow boxes for crowded provinces, and a Victory Point track running along two sides of the board.

The counter sheet. There's a lot of redundancy built in, with twenty-seven of the
counters marked as "Spares," but that's better than a whole lot of unused board.

COIN games use a mixture of wooden pieces and cardboard counters in game play. The wooden cubes, discs and cylinders represent the forces and resources available to each faction, while the counters the status of popular opinion in the provinces, civil unrest and terror, and NRA/Japanese control over provinces, and of course each faction’s Victory Points and Patronage level on the VP Track.

The counters for COIN games are traditionally a mix of pre-rounded larger counters, other shaped counters (mostly circles, which I guess are technically also pre-rounded) and die-cut, half-inch punch squares that inevitably retain their corner tufts. The counters for China’s war are no exception. The counter sheet is a thick brown-core cardstock. The registration is good and the counters pop easily, even the die-cut squares.

Guerrillas and Action markers (left), Forces and Bases (right), and the
factional dice (top). I like the muted colour pallet of the pieces.

The wooden tokens included in China’s War are many and varied. The Japanese faction has blocks of two colours representing Troops and Police. The Nationalist faction has blocks representing troops, disks that represent bases (headquarters, supply dumps, etc.), and cylinders representing Guerrilla forces (guerrilla units are stencilled at one end; stencil end down means the unit is inactive, stencil up means it has been activated, which puts it in danger of being discovered). The Warlords also have Troops and Base markers. The Communists have no troops, only bases and Guerrillas.

In keeping with established COIN conventions, eight Pawn pieces are also included, four Black and four white. These can be used as mnemonic markers to remind the active player of Operations taking place in multiple locations on the board. Each faction also gets their own colour-matched die. This are a little small for my preference but given how much stuff is already packed into the box, I can appreciate why these were chosen. To be fair, they are quite good colour matches for the factions.

Sun Wukong AI cards (left), and the Event card deck. Syb Wuking is a reference
 to the Monkey King from the Chinese epic, Journey to the West.

China’s war comes with two decks of cards; the 52-card Event deck will be familiar to those who have played earlier COIN-series games, with 48 Event cards and four Propaganda cards. I’m not going to get into the functions of the cards here; I’ll go into that in greater detail when I write up an AAR. The second, shorter deck of 24 Tarot-sized cards is the engine for the Sun Wukong non-player system.

Both sets of cards look and feel nice. They are printed on the same weight of cardstock and are comparable to good commercial playing cards in terms of quality. Graphically, the Event cards are gorgeous. I’m always astounded at how many usable and thematically appropriate photographs are discovered for the modern-era COIN game decks. They are clearly presented and shouldn’t prove difficult at the table (unless you have a player who insists on picking up each freshly-turned card and examining it for three or for minutes before placing it back on top of the deck for the other players to view).

The Sun Wukong cards are a deck of twenty-four, divided into four sets of six, one set for each faction. These are printed on both sides, each set providing twelve possible AI response selections to a given game state on that faction’s turn.

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I’ve talked elsewhere on A Fast Game about coming up to a point where, due to the storage limits of our apartment, I have to start making some choices about collection development and shedding some of my games, but I’m beginning to realise now that the time to make those choices is already here. I’ve been pulling back from multi-player games in the last twelve months or so, concentrating mostly on acquiring and keeping solitaire (or solo-able) and two-player games. While COIN games have made great leaps in solitaire playability, they really are best experienced with four players. Luckily, I still have a weekly gaming group that is happy to occasionally indulge in multi-player wargaming.

Like I said at the start, China’s War was practically an auto-buy for me (budget permitting) for the subject and for the design pedigree. I’m really grateful to Grant Linneberg at Pushing Cardboard for the giveaway prize (and if you’re not already listening to Grant’s podcasts, do yourself a favour and check them out) the good folks at GMT for swapping out a game I’d already bought (directly from them) for one I had really wanted.