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. Sun Wukong 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.

 

 

State of Play: Brief Border Wars (2/6): Third Indochina War

    

 

Our second run at Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020) took us to the north of Vietnam in early 1979 for the Third Indochina War. After the French and American Wars, the national government of the newly reunited Vietnam were resistant to any foreign power trying to exert influence over their country. Erstwhile ally and material supporter of the North Vietnamese in their American War, the Chinese Communist Party were of the opinion that the uppity Vietnamese government needed to be taught to know their place. The limited engagement took twenty-one days to resolve, at which time the Chinese forces withdrew, claiming victory and insisting their objectives had all been accomplished.

Situation at start. The  two artillery units on the East/West Front border and the infantry
 unit on the Tongmianzhen/Dongxing border (South-East end of the border) are free
placement  units for the Chinese player. The two Vietnamese units in the Damaged
box were actually mobilised from further south; this reflects the time it took for them
to to reach the front.

Taking a lesson from our last game, T took the Chinese aggressors, while I played the defending Vietnamese forces. The Chinese have superior numbers and this on its own could spell victory, but the Vietnamese units tend to be a little tougher, and they have the home-ground advantage the terrain bonus in defensive combat). Still, the numbers can play to the necessary Chinese aggression strategy. Remember, victory is determined by the points-value of the provinces controlled by the aggressor nation at the end of the final turn, and control is defined by at least one undisrupted friendly unit in the area with no undisrupted defending units in that area. BBW rules dictate that the Attacker in a combat situation can dictate which units participate in that combat on both sides. This way, they can single out individual Vietnamese units for targeting, while managing the risk to their forces more effectively. The Chinese player doesn’t need to place every Vietnamese unit out of action, but merely to either disrupt or force a retreat on each enemy unit.

That said, it’s still going to be a hard task. The Chinese are also impeded by an arbitrary partition in the battle-scape; the PLA forces are split in two and restricted to operating in either the Western or Eastern area of the border region. Units from one sector cannot cross the dotted line to support their comrades in the other sector.

Unprovoked Chinese aggression (West front).
Note on unit orientation: because of the smaller 17" x 22"  map, it was easier
 for both of us to sit at the corner of the table instead of on opposite sides.

The Vietnamese have an inverse advantage; roughly a third of their overall strength is invested in Local Forces (LF). While the rules prohibit regular professional army units from leaving an area with undisrupted enemy forces present, the LF units can ignore this rule. Not only that, LF units can be moved from the Vietnamese Rear Area directly to any province bordering China. This came in very handy in the last round.

T came out swinging in the first turn. The card distribution of the first draw was four Chinese (white band) activation cards to two Vietnamese (grey band). The cards, have two values – movement and combat, and can be played for one or the other value. The value tells you how many units you can activate to commit to the chosen action on that card-play; if you have a card with a Combat value of 3 and a Movement value of 8. You can commit three units to engage in combat for that card-play, or you can choose to move units to the value of eight points (units can move from one area to an adjacent area each card-play; road movement costs a unit one point, while off-road movement will cost two points). In the first turn, T mobilised nearly all of his forces, pushing into nearly every province bordering China. I played coy, and in the Eastern Front, began to withdraw units in the northern provinces, hoping to lure T into following, so I could encircle his units and put them out of supply. Alas, he didn’t fall for it, instead choosing to fight some of the units still occupying border provinces in the Western Front, singling out the more powerful Regulars.

Unprovoked Chinese aggression (East front).

In Turn 2 we drew an equal number of cards, but the grey Random Event card came up, effectively robbing me of another opportunity; this was to be the pattern for the whole game. I rolled a 4 – Rear Area Chaos. Another roll was required: on a 1-3 the Chinese would be affected; on a 4-6, the Vietnamese. On the subsequent roll (a 2), it was the Chinese who couldn’t move anything up from their Rear Area for that turn. As it turned out, this was a small sacrifice for T as he’d moved all but three of his reserve units forward already.

Brief Border Wars is a game of skill and of chance. I wouldn’t say in equal portions, but both play their part in a given outcome. Turn three saw a 4-2 break in the cards in T’s favour again. I mostly concentrated on conservation of my units while T cherry-picked the most valuable provinces to try to take and hold. I could have told him that, in this scenario in particular, it probably matters less what you do in the first three or so turns, because of the room for reversal in the subsequent turns.

Random Event Card (not always a good thing).

Turn 4 saw the white band Random Event card drawn, and T rolled a 5 on the table: Diplomatic pressure for cease-fire. The game would now finish on turn 6, and to ensure this, the next six cards are drawn from the activation deck and discarded. These happened to be five grey-band cards (Vietnamese) to one white-band. That hurt me a little, but not too much since I’d avoided initiating combat for the last two hands after putting up a show of resistance in the first turn.

I had taken hits on some units rather than choosing retreat to soak a hit, gambling on bringing them back into action at full strength. T had been doing the same thing, I think, and we had both been using our Special Action cards for this purpose. T had burned through his in the last round. T lead each turn because he held the majority of cards (and the Aggressor faction leads in ties). Coming into the last round, I had one Special Action card left, which gave us both an equal number of playable cards.

The situation looks desperate.

With his last card played, I think T was feeling confident of at least a minor victory. On my last card play, I had 8 movement points available. I had two LF units in my Rear area. I moved one each into Hi Giang and Cao Bang, two provinces previously devoid of Vietnamese troops, and managed to move a couple of regular infantry units into other areas T was sure he’d had sown up. In the final analysis, only one of the occupied provinces was secured by non-disrupted Chinese forces, a major victory for the Vietnamese (though I’m sure the outcome would have been spun differently in Beijing).

My final gambit felt a little gamey and I’m not proud of winning on what felt like a technicality. If I hadn’t garnered Cao Bang and Hi Giang (either side of the demarcation line between West and East Fronts), T would have finished the game five points up instead of one, which still would have only been a draw. There is an element of gaminess inherent in BBW due to the limitations imposed on the system. It was always intended to be a fast-playing, small footprint game, and the area movement and simple, handful-of-dice combat resolution lend an element of RISK (Parker Brothers, 1959) to the feel of play.

Final game state, end of Turn 6.

Upon deeper consideration, I don’t feel like that’s fair to the game. The simplicity of the rules (four pages, plus special rules for each scenario) bely what is really a deep strategy game. Like a lot of wargames, BBW gives both sides a complete and unhindered view of the battle-space, which itself is unrealistic. Allowing the Local Forces to move quickly and with impunity from the Rear Area to the frontier is reflective of the fact that by 1979, the Vietnamese army and irregulars had gained thirty-odd years of experience fighting a better equipped invading force, and had taken to heart everything they learned. On reflection, I can’t help but think that Ho Chi Minh himself may have smiled at my dog-move at the very end of the game.

COIN isn’t the only system that models asymmetric warfare really well.