War in the Pacific, subtitled "The Campaign Against Imperial Japan, 1941–45", is a large and complex strategic board wargame published by Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI) in 1978 that simulates the Pacific Campaign during World War II. Critics gave the game positive reviews, praising its use of logistics and "fog of war", and its well-written rules.
Description
War in the Pacific is a two-player board wargame where one player controls Japanese forces and the other player controls Allied forces. With a 56-page rulebook, 3200 die-cut counters, and seven maps totaling 88" x 102" (224 cm x 260 cm), the game has been rated as 100 on a complexity scale of 100. Every warship from aircraft carriers and battleships down to destroyers that sailed on the Pacific Ocean during World War II is represented by a counter. Air counters represent a grouping of ten aircraft.
Gameplay
The game uses a complex series of three naval and three air phases each turn, which represent one week of the war. Supply and logistics play a central part of the game. Supply points must be transported to where they are needed, usually via merchant shipping, which is vulnerable to enemy submarines and aircraft. As critic John Kula noted, "Victory stands, and falls, on the ability of the players to generate, move and use their supply points. Everything depends on supply points and bases. Everything. Supply in the Pacific would have been a more accurate name for the game."
Rather than having hundreds of ship counters on the map at the same time, player organize their ships into various task forces off the map, and place one counter on the map for each task force.
The "fog of war" is an important part of the game. As a task force counter steams across the Pacific, the opponent tries to glean what ships are in the task force and therefore the possible mission of the task force. Although land-based observers and submarines can produce accurate reports, players must depend mainly on aircraft, which have a lower rate of accuracy. For each air-based observation of a task force, the task force owner pulls a random counter which directs the player to give the observing player either the complete truth of the task force's composition, a somewhat exaggerated or underestimated composition, or a completely false report. As critic Nicky Palmer noted, "While many other games have attacked the problem of excessive information, War in the Pacific is the first strategic game to incorporate partial intelligence as the cornerstone of its system. More than anything else, this feature distinguishes the simulation and justifies the considerable effort which playing the game requires."
Although there are ten different playing aids included with the game, each player is still required to keep extensive notes. As Nicky Palmer noted, "The playing aids provided need to be supplemented by copious scratch paper, best assembled in loose-leaf notebooks to keep some control of the situation."
Scenarios
The game offers five separate scenarios, each of which can take between 10 and 60 hours to play: "Pearl Harbor" (Six months/24 turns) "Midway" (Two months/8 turns) "Guadalcanal" (5 months/21 turns) "Burma" (6 months/26 turns) "Leyte" (2 months/8 turns) All five scenarios can be combined into a campaign game covering the entire war, which takes several hundred hours to complete.
Publication history
In the mid-1970s, SPI published several "monster" wargames (games with more than 1000 counters) that proved very popular, including War in Europe (1976), Terrible Swift Sword (1976), and Wacht am Rhein (1977). Following the success of these games, a team of game designers — Edward Curran, Jim Dunnigan, Irad B. Hardy, and Tom Walczyk — created War in the Pacific, SPI's most complex game to date. It was published in 1978 with graphic design by Redmond A. Simonsen, packaged in either a large "detergent box" format, or a "flatpack" package of four plastic trays.
War in the Pacific proved popular, and stayed in SPI's Top 10 Bestselling Games list for six months after its publication.
In 1989, Hobby Japan published a Japanese-language edition titled "太平洋戦争" (Pacific War).
Decision Games acquired the rights to War in the Pacific and published a second edition in 2006. In an extensive revision of the rules, this edition replaced the entire supply logistics system with a command point system.