Golden Annual No. 3:
Great War at Sea: South Seas Mandate
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
March 2025

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 (I doubt any of those exist, but if they do, they could).

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; South Seas Mandate’s story and scenario set lead directly into our full-sized War Plan Orange game. We’ll of course at some point issue additional scenarios (probably in Campaign Study format) allowing you to play with ships from one game on the map from the other.

I wanted the ships in South Seas Mandate to be 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 or the Imperial Japanese navies, but not actually built.

The Japanese powerhouse is the Type I battle cruiser, the design that preceded the Amagi class and is 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 356mm (14-inch) guns is formidable, 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 169, part of a series of designs that would lead to the Lexington-class battle cruisers. Design 169 is a smaller ship than those monsters, but she’s still huge in her own right (33,500 tons) and likewise designed for 35 knots. She has better protection than her Japanese foe, in keeping with the American obsession of the time, and more firepower, with ten 14-inch guns.

She still lacked the protection of a battleship, having sacrificed armor for speed and firepower. Another battle cruiser design, a slimmed-down version of the New York-class battleship, is based on the 1910 battle cruiser design, that quickly fell out of favor (along with Wyoming) thanks to the advent of a powerful, effective new 14-inch gun ordered at the same time as the “long” 12-inch gun that armed Wyoming. This ship has six of the new rifles, battleship-scale protection and the much less extreme top speed of 26 knots.

The Japanese also have two variations of their Type X battle cruiser. She’s a decidedly 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.

The American admirals loved their big armored cruisers, and well after they had become white elephants the U.S. Navy sought ways to modernize the design (either through rebuilding the existing ships, or building more but improved ships like them). One of these improvements, proposed in 1904, would have widened the hull to accommodate a twin turret for 12-inch guns in place of the then-current 10-inch guns, with the ship lengthened as well. She would be armored to resist her own shellfire (a constant American requirement) with a great many light guns in keeping with American armored cruiser designs (to fend off enemy torpedo attacks).

The battle cruisers would no0t be expected to operate alone, and so both sides have these useful ships as well. These Japanese receive three of the Tenryu-kai design, an improved version of the light cruiser Tenryu, and all four of the Kako-class heavy cruisers in their original form with single gun mounts rather than dual turrets for their 7.9-inch guns.

The Americans counter with two alternatives proposed in 1920. Scout C weighed in at 10,000 tons, carrying seven 8-inch guns in three unarmored gunhouses and expected to make 36 knots. She was designed in answer to the British Hawkins class, but was considered too expensive, too fast and too heavily armed for her designed role. Scout D seemed more suited to the mission, with five six-inch guns on half the displacement at a speed of 33.5 knots. The Navy could, planners estimated, build half again as many of this ship on the same budget.

With both sides fielding small fleets of very fast ships, the action is going to be centered on the type of quick raids and probes to be expected before the main battle fleets clash in War Plan Orange. The Golden Annual format only allows for a dozen scenarios (what other publishers call a full-sized game); this is the game that Pacific Crossroads should have been, with an integrated story told in our story-arc format.

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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 and three children. He misses his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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