[Consim-l] Smithsonian Midway

[Mike NotSpecified]

Had the opportunity to play several games of this recently, all solo 
unfortunately so a key portion of the game was limited to my ability to fool 
myself.  Please keep that in mind.

I'm really glad I had solicited opinions first, and was not surprised to find 
that Markus's comments seemed to be right on target.  He said searching was 
too easy and combat too bloody, and backed up at least the searching opinion 
with a nice essay analyzing the effectiveness of the Catalina's in this and 
other carrier games.
(http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/user/mst/games/misc/search2.pdf)

The beginner wargame (ages 12 and up!) is a strange beast.  On the one hand, 
it has to be simple enough for the beginner to grasp and stay within their 
attention span (which was probably longer back in 1982 than it is now) and on 
the other hand it has to do a sufficiently good enough job of capturing the 
situation to distinguish itself from say, Battleship.  I'm increasingly 
thinking of this as a relationship, Satisfaction to Effort.

Midway does a pretty good job of this in my opinion.  Player effort, 
particularly in the basic game is low, only two pages of rules.  And the feel 
of the situation is pretty good, especially if you are not too demanding or as 
well informed as say Markus, which is a pretty safe bet for the introductory 
market segment.

One think glaringly missing from the basic game is the fighters, no CAP, no 
escorts, no air to air at all, just bombing missions.  Fighters are covered in 
an optional rule, which serves as a nice illustration of my ratio theory. 
 Adding in the fighters drives up Satisfaction considerable more than it 
increases the effort required, thus the whole ratio improves quite a bit.

Another optional rule, for submarines, works in the opposite direction.  It 
does not really increase the effort much, just adds a step in which any 
spotted task force may be attacked by an enemy submarine, but this adds 
nothing to my satisfaction because it is an ahistorical use of the submarines. 
 The game in effect just adds another random element with this rule instead of 
allowing the players to set up submarine picket lines.  So even the slight 
additional effort required drives the overall ratio down as I find nothing 
satisfying about just adding another round of die-rolling to the game.

Beyond the Basic game players are pretty much free to add whichever optional 
rules appeal to them.  A little judicious choosing yields a rule set that does 
a pretty good job of covering the important aspects of the situation.  There 
are certainly things left out, but given that it is an introductory game I was 
pretty well satisfied with the coverage.

The combat system is very luck dependent and huge swings in the possible 
outcomes can be frustrating.  It works by assigning each ship/plane/base an 
attack and defense factor.  Each player takes his factor, plus some modifiers 
in some cases, and adds them to a D10 roll.  The attacker wins if his total is 
more, and if it is 2X the defender than the defender takes the equivalent of 3 
hits, and if it is 3X than the defender is eliminated.

This system has several advantages.  It is very easy to implement (thus 
contributes to the low effort required), it is used for all combats (again, 
low effort) and it does a fine job of mirroring the huge swings seen 
historically (Wave after wave of American attackers accomplished nothing at 
Midway, then a handful of dive bombers sank 4 carriers!).

But this system is also pretty frustrating for the player sometimes.  Say my 
Wildcat (5) is attacking your Zero (2).  If we both roll a 1, then we end up 
with 6:3 and your Zero is half destroyed.  If I roll a 4 and you roll a 1 then 
it's 9:3 and your Zero is completely destroyed.  But let the Japanese player 
roll an average of 5 for a total defense of 7 and suddenly the US player needs 
a roll of at least a 9 to get the half destroyed result.  You can see that the 
result is very heavily dependent on the defenders die roll, far more so than 
on the defenders intrinsic defense rating or anything the attacker does.  It 
becomes imperative for the defender to roll high with his high value targets. 
 Which ends up leaving the impression that there is little for the player to 
do other than hope for good dice.

The Basic scenario is just carriers vs. carriers and has little to recommend 
it beyond learning the rules.  The middle scenario starts with the Japanese 
carriers close enough to launch an air strike against Midway, which is a 
pretty good idea because with sufficient commitment and decent dice they can 
eliminate the base AND all the planes there, which eliminates one of the big 
US advantages, namely the air search capability of the Catalina’s from Midway. 
 The campaign scenario starts earlier which gives both sides more options for 
maneuvering their fleets and is therefore more interesting.

Overall I liked the game as an introductory game.  It captures most of the 
important aspects of the situation in an easy to learn and fast playing game. 
 By my 4th game I could play the entire campaign in a couple of hours.  So the 
effort rating is definitely nice and low, even with most of the optional rules 
in play.  The trade-off is that some realism has been sacrificed and the 
combat seems too luck dependent.  It's not a game I would come back to over 
and over, but it does fit the bill when you need a smaller game that can be 
played in a short timeframe, perfect for business trips and cramped hotels.

It also does one other thing every introductory game should do, namely it does 
serve as a nice springboard to more complex games.  I have Yaquinto's CV on 
the table now and while it is far more complex, all of the basic concepts are 
perfectly familiar and I suspect the beginner who has a little Midway 
experience would find it far less overwhelming than otherwise would be the 
case.