Last summer during my free time, I got it in my head that I would make a WWII turn-based wargame. I was inspired by reading about the carrier battles in the Pacific, notably the Battle of Coral Sea, Battle of Midway, and Battle of Leyte Gulf. I had also heard that regarding the Battle of Midway, when played as a military war game, the Japanese always won in the ‘simulation’. It made me want to make a relatively realistic yet practical turn-based pencil and paper type game.
I am no stranger to the concept of a turn-based strategy board game. I’ve made simple ones that are like stripped-down versions of Warhammer 40,000. They were lots of fun, particularly since by playing them we also playtested them, shaping and modifying rules as problems/exploits came about. So I wanted to make a carrier-battle game, but I ran into some problems- I wanted the planes and ships to have somewhat realistic properties regarding speed, weaponry, etc, but the game also had to be streamlined enough so that it wouldn’t take all day to finish a scenario. I also had to have some way of making it so that each side would have to ‘scout’ to find the other side. But how do you do this with only two players? I ran into a similar problem when I tried to make a submarine board game.
I know there have got to be some decent board games out there. I’m not giving up on making my own, rather, I’d like to see how some existing games deal with the bottlenecks I’ve encountered. Are there any fans out there who play these games?
I haven’t played actual tabletop wargames in over a decade, and not regularly since I was in college, during the heydays of Avalon Hill Games. They got bought by Hasbro and then shut down for not being appealing to the masses…
Anyway, you can still find titles on Ebay from AH. The all-time classic was “Squad Leader,” but there were also hundreds of other titles recreating modern war scenarios from Stalingrad to Vietnam, historical battles like Waterloo, and futuristic battles like Starship Troopers (Heinlein, not Verhoeven).
I suggest, if you’re going to play alone, that you find the old SSI PC games licensed from Avalon Hill: Panzer General, Allied General, Pacific General, and my favorite: Fantasy General. Do a search on the web for these titles, and you will find groups of enthusiasts who still play each other frequently.
And it’s no surprise, these games are addictive, and as good as any of the box games, and best of all, the computer takes care of all of the mechanics.
They require something like DOSBox to run on anything newer than Win98 (or on a Mac or Unix box), although I have been able to coax my wife’s WinME laptop to run FG.
All the battles you mentioned (except Leyte gulf) are available in two boardgames : Flat top an Avalon Hill re-release of a Battleline game and C.V. (no, it’s not a typo, this is what the game is called) by Yaquinto. FT covers all the Solomon air-sea battles with several scenarios, whil C.V. covers Midway. Both of them are out of print so I guess Ebay would be your best choice.
When I was young the guy, (adult man without kids) played this game that was too complex for a kid. But you played WWII Navel battles in the yard and to scale. They had little ships about 1 to 2 inches long and protracters and measured out the distances.
You would say stand by your ship and then say aim your guns for 32 degrees off the port bow and set a range and then measure out the string to see if you hit. Of cousre the ships moved about on the lawn as well.
But they didnt’ use carriers. I also remember that he had a model of the Missouri that was about 8 feet long he was working on in the house.
I had strange, then un-namable feelings about his wife too.
God I envied that man.
Another AH game to look at is Firepower, which can be configured to recreate any skirmish from the last 40 years or so.
Victory Games, a subsidiary of AH, produced a couple of single-player wargames that were quite good: Ambush! and Battlehymn. These proved to be so popular that the system used was converted into the two-player Shell Shock!.
Squad Leader was extremely popular and eventually outgrew itself. (There were three expansion “gamettes” that added lots of cool things but ultimately became a nightmare of four often-conflicting rulebooks.) In the mid-1980’s Avalon Hill basically started over and released Advanced Squad Leader - the same essential game, but heavily reworked, streamlined, and improved.
The full business details elude me, but when the dust from the Hasbro purchase settled a small enthusiast company called Multiman Publishing acquired the rights to ASL and basically took over “upkeep” of the game.
It’s still going strong, with die-hard enthusiast groups not hard to find and new material being produced.
It’s not the sort of thing you were describing in the OP, but rather a fanatically-detailed low-level World War II ground combat game. The base infantry unit is a “squad” of ten(-ish) men, with select individual dudes getting their own counters. Vehicles are represented individually.
The learning curve is quite steep; this game is not for the faint of heart. If you’re into this sort of thing, though, there’s enough material to last a lifetime (at least).