Russo-Japanese War:
Scenarios and History, Part One
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2023

Great War at Sea is the game series that made Avalanche Press a going concern. That was many years ago, and now we’re returning to print with a new set of series rules that incorporate the lessons of more than 25 years of World War One naval operations.

The first Second Edition release is Russo-Japanese War. It’s a game about the naval side of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, and it brings the approach we’ve been using in recent Second World War at Sea series games (our World War Two sister series to Great War at Sea). The story – in this case the naval campaign of the Russo-Japanese War – unfolds through a mixture of historical background text and the game’s scenarios. Each important point in the campaign is also shown in one or more scenarios; you don’t have to play them all to follow the story, but you could. Or you could just pick out the ones that seem most interesting to you. Or you don’t have to play any of them – plenty of people enjoy their games that way (but don’t tell anyone).

Great War at Sea is a relatively simple game to play, as historical wargames go. Players take the role of fleet commanders, moving their fleets across the operational map, which shows the region where the campaign took place at a scale of 32 to 36 miles across each square Sea Zone (some games share the 36-mile scale of Second World War at Sea; others, like Russo-Japanese War, are set at 32 miles across each. In practice, it very rarely makes a difference).

The fleets have objectives, depending on the scenario: convoy escort, amphibious landings, bombardments, or stopping the other guy from carrying out his mission. When they find an enemy fleet – and this is harder in Russo-Japanese War than in other Great War at Sea games set a decade later, as there are no airplanes or airships to help you out – then play moves to the Naval Tactical Map where you shoot it out with guns and torpedoes.

Individual ships get to move on the Naval Tactical Map, and you roll dice to see if you got a hit with those guns and torpedoes – lots of dice. Roll a 6, get a hit. Ships are rated for three types of guns (primary, secondary and tertiary) and three thicknesses of armor (heavy, light and none). Primary guns go through anything, secondary guns through light armor, and tertiary guns can only damaged unarmored parts of the target ship. Put enough damage on the enemy ship’s hull, and it will sink. You might also knock out her guns or torpedoes, or kill her captain.

That game system suits the Russo-Japanese War very nicely. It was the first and last war waged by fleets of modern steel battleships, what would soon come to be called “pre-dreadnoughts.” On paper, the fleets were more or less equal (much of the Russian Empire’s naval strength was still in Europe), but the Japanese had the aggressive and hyper-competent Heihachiro Togo in command. Togo operated as though he had a three-to-one superiority or better, while the Russians hid behind the incomplete fortifications of Port Arthur. The latter move actually made some sense, given the poor state of Russian training in 1904.

After Makarov’s death, things got worse for the Russians. The Japanese turned back an attempt to break free and steam to Vladivostok, and eventually the Japanese besieged Port Arthur and shot the remaining Russian battleships to pieces with their siege guns. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed around the world, arriving months after any hope of changing the situation had ended, and Togo kicked their ass, too. Russia had been humbled by an Asian upstart.

For the new Second Edition of Russo-Japanese War, I decided to lead off with the operations of the Russian Vladivostok Squadron. While that was sort of a side-show to the main event, it’s also a relatively straightforward set of scenarios without the rules load of the scenarios set around Port Arthur: amphibious landings, mine warfare and so on.

The Russian position is split by the Korean Peninsula. On the western side, the coast facing the Yellow Sea with China on the opposite shore, is their main fleet base at Port Arthur with their main fleet (up there in the upper left). On the eastern side, facing the Sea of Japan with the Japanese west coast on the other side, is the port and naval base at Vladivostok (top center, with nothing else nearby). There, the Russians have a cruiser squadron of four ships. They probably should have put a few more there before the war began, but they probably should have done a lot of things before the war began, starting with not provoking a war they weren’t ready to fight (this seems to be a Russian thing in this century, too). But that’s not the player’s problem.

The Japanese aren’t in much better shape, though – the important objectives are on the other side of Korea, so they can’t use units from their battle fleet to chase those Russian cruisers. And unlike the main Russian fleet at Port Arthur, the Vladivostok squadron was led by a series of aggressive commanders ready to take the war to the Japanese. So the Japanese tried to have it both ways, placing their fast squadron of armored cruisers in the Tsushima Islands between Japan and Korea, where they could in theory steam north-west to help out around Port Arthur, or north-east to chase the Vladivostok cruisers.

Mitigating the Japanese problem somewhat is the fact that, in 1904 anyway, the west coast of Japan just didn’t have much going on. The really rich targets are on the other side, and the Russians can only get there through three relatively narrow straits: between Korea and the Japanese main island of Honshu, between Honshu and the northern island of Hokkaido, and between Hokkaido and the Russian penal-colony-island of Sakhalin. The Japanese can just patrol these narrow waters – except, because they flung their full strength at Port Arthur, they didn’t.

Considering the maintenance cycle of early-20th-Century warships, the Russians operated out of Vladivostok nearly continuously. They raided both coasts of Japan, losing one cruiser to grounding and then the other three (one sunk, two badly damaged) in an attempt to aid a breakout from Port Arthur – thanks to high command incompetence, the fleet had already abandoned the attempt to escape Port Arthur before the cruisers had even left Vladivostok.

Next time, we’ll look at the Port Arthur chapters.

Click here to order Russo-Japanese War right now!

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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 will never forget his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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