In our WWII Game Day West Theme for December we visited the South Pacific in particular the not so quiet waters off of Guadalcanal in November of 1942. The Japanese were desperate to supply their ground forces on the island and having seen freighters bombed, submarines coming up short in cargo space they elected a novel approach of using Destroyers as supply ships. The plan was simple, fill a bunch of oil drums with supplies, chains them together and kick’em over the side of Fleet Destroyers as they made a high speed night run towards the island and an equally high speed run away hoping to avoid American aircraft.
One the other side of the coin was a group of American Cruisers and Destroyers heading to intercept the nighttime run with a somewhat cobbled together plan that had been worked out only to have the commander who designed it changed just before the battle. What could possibly go wrong….
Steve Lowry had pulled this interesting scenario from the history books and after trying it with General Quarters III for the Wednesday Night Group we switched to Nimitz rules and devoted a couple of the Semi Regular Retirees Games to it trying to make adjustments looking for something a little closer to the historical outcome.
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving Pat L, Steve T and Steve L did a run through where we learned that to get the battle a bit closer to it’s historical results we needed to start the forces closer and to create some scenario rules to better cover night actions.
Above the IJN DDs head in to drop their supplies. Historically when the Japanese Admiral sighted the US forces the supply run was abandoned in favor of surface combat.
The game was an IJN victory with the supply run complete and the DD force making a getaway.
On Thursday 12/4/25 with some scenario rules to cover both the opening action with IJN torpedoes striking first and night actions we gave the game another run.
This game saw Pat L, Steve T, Ravi R, Mark J and Steve L all pitch in with their thoughts on both the new start point, but also the draft night spotting rules. All the contributions were valuable and contributed to what we hope to be a helpful work product for our naval gaming. The “Visual Naval Night Spotting Rules” should allow us to give a better but quick determination for our gaming in an area that is either glossed over in many naval rule sets or ends up delving into minutia slowing the gaming action for the players.
The start of the 12/4 battle with the IJN torpedo attack. While Steve L didn’t have the best of days with his dice rolls it did serve as a respectable proof of concept as a place to start the scenario. Adding in a bit of command paralysis for the USN player gave the game a more historical start place.
From the 11/20 game showing the various markers. The Flash Markers indicating ships that had fired and were thus visible to all vessels on the board. The speed markers for the formations show the speed of the ships and affect when they move in the turn sequence.
The previous run throughs were designed to improve the game for its arrival at December Game Day West and that seems to have come to pass reasonably well. Jim B (IJN) and Greg D (USN) took on the various commands. The scenario starting at the torpedo phase of turn one with the IJN having spotted the US Task Force.
Luck was with the IJN as Jim simply couldn’t miss as he unloaded salvo after salvo of the deadly 24″ Long Lance torpedoes into the American Cruisers striking four out of five with the highly explosive fish. Switching from hits to converting to damage was another round of efficient dice rolling for Jim and what was once a proud line of American Heavy and Light Cruisers quickly became smoking hulks as all four hits overwhelmed the ship’s armor sending them all to the bottom. Seeing no possible hope of victory the US task force broke off the action retiring for port.
Steve Lowry gives us a look (above) at the American line after the IJN greeted it with Long Lance torpedoes and adds this update…..
“Here is a picture of the American battle line after Jim rolled the dice. I later calculated the odds of 4 American heavy cruisers being sunk as greater than one in a thousand (it was one out of 6 for each ship). 6x6x6x6 = 1,296. First you had to get a hit (4, 5 or 6 on a six-sided die) then you had to roll a 5 or 6 on a six-sided die to do sufficient damage (1 out of 3) to sink it. The combination was 1/2 x 1/3 or 1/6.”
Stephen Lowry
Thanks to all the players over these last few weeks as we worked out the kinks and developed what we hope to be some workable night spotting rules. Thanks also to Miniature Market Rock Hill for their continued support.
