Golden Annual No. 3:
Great War at Sea: South Seas Mandate
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2022

Here at Avalanche Press, we tend to keep various statistics – sales numbers and such – to ourselves. There’s little good that come from sharing; stan culture existed among wargamers well before Eminem gave it a name and there’s no reason to stoke their rage.

So with some trepidation, I’ll admit that for 2022, the Avalanche Press Gold Club is at its maximum size. We have never had more members enrolled than we do right now. And that allows us to do some things that we’d long wished to, but really lacked the numbers to justify.

At the top of that list is the Golden Annual: an original, complete game, exclusively for the Gold Club, free to members when we first offer it. I knew that the hard-core wanted it, and I wanted to do it. And now we can.

Great War at Sea: South Seas Mandate is a complete game with everything you need to play included (except dice). It will have the new Second Edition series rules for the venerable Great War at Sea series, and serve as an entry point to the series for the handful of Gold Club members who’ve never played a Great War at Sea game.

The map is from our long out-of-print Pacific Crossroads, and depicts the Central Pacific between the Marianas and New Guinea (the region of Japan’s post-World War One South Seas Mandate). It’s made up of two heavy cardstock panels, for a total playing area of 22 by 17 inches. The pieces are completely new: 50 die-cut and silky-smooth pieces, thirty of them “long” ship pieces, and the other 20 small warships, transports and markers.

The action is set in 1920, just after the First World War, with the United States Navy having activated its War Plan Orange for an advance across the Central Pacific toward the Philippines. The Japanese hold bases at Saipan and Truk, the Americans have a coaling station at Guam (until the Japanese take it from them) and there’s a neutral but Japanese-friendly port at Rabaul. It’s up to the Americans to slash their way past, but Japanese doctrine of the time called for wearing them down with light forces, and that’s exactly what the Japanese will try to do.

Each side’s forces are built around cruisers, from battle cruisers on down to light cruisers. These are the preliminary rounds of Plan Orange, before the battle fleets get involved. We went with a mix of ships completely new to Great War at Sea – since we made up the war, we get to make up the ships, too. They’re not complete works of fiction – all of them are ships actually proposed and sometimes designed by the United States of Imperial Japanese navies, but not actually built.

The Japanese powerhouse is the Type I battle cruiser, the design the preceded the Amagi class and usually described as the battle cruiser equivalent of the Nagato-class battleships. She’s a long and slender ship, both to give her fine lines to improve her speed, and to accommodate the huge power plant necessary to drive her at 33 knots.

Her main armament of eight 410mm (16.1-inch) guns is more formidable than anything in the American arsenal (at least in this game), and when coupled with her speed makes her a deadly foe – though she’s armored on the scale of a battle cruiser, not a fast battleship.

The Americans counter with Design 150, part of a series of designs that would lead to the Lexington-class battle cruisers. Design 150 is a smaller ship than those monsters, though likewise designed for 35 knots. She has better protection than her Japanese foe, in keeping with the American obsession fo the time, but a lesser armament, with eight 14-inch guns.

Design 150 also came with a shocking price tag, and to lower her cost and bring her displacement down to 26,000 tons, an alternative sketch featured a scaled-down ship with eight 10-inch guns as her main armament. The American admirals loved the 10-inch guns of their last class of armored cruisers, and continually sought excuses to get them to sea again. But this alternative appears to have been a bureaucratic sacrificial lamb, intended to be slaughtered in the budget/procurement wars, and so she was. But she gets to rise again and see action in South Seas Mandate.

Rather than a scaled-down version of Design 150, the Navy’s General Board went with an enlarged version with ten rather than eight 14-inch guns, still in four turrets – the keep the ship long and narrow for high speed, the triple turrets were in the raised positions, super-firing over the twin turrets. We’ve included this variation as well; you’ll get to use all three ship designs, and all of them at the same time.

The Japanese also have two variations of their Type X battle cruiser. She’s an odd ship, a scaled-up light cruiser hull (she appears to be an enlarged Furutaka) with 12-inch guns (one version has three of them in single mounts, the other has four, also in single mounts). She doesn’t have much in the way of protection (she’s basically naked in terms of armor) but she is exceptionally fast.

Some light cruisers and destroyers round out both fleets, but at their core are the battle cruisers. That makes for a game of hit-and-run operations, with each side probing the other’s defenses as both prepare for the inevitable showdown to come.

All of the new ship designs will also appear, of course, in modernized form in the Second World War at Sea expansion set The Emperor’s Sword.

The very first Golden Annual, Infantry Attacks: Black Mountain, is rolling off the presses at this writing. It’s a fine little package, and I expect the same from South Seas Mandate – this is the game that Pacific Crossroads should have been, with an integrated story told in our story-arc format. South Seas Mandate will have all the scenarios we can stuff into the package (a dozen of them), and we’ll no doubt add more as Gold Club Premium Content, because we can.

I’m glad we can finally do things like this for the Gold Club; we’ll branch out into Rome at War and Panzer Grenadier (Modern) with our next annuals. This is a new era for the Gold Club, and it’s going to be fun.

The Golden Annual is only available to the Gold Club (that’s why we call it the Golden Annual).

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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