South Pacific:
Design Notes
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
November 2022

While I’ve designed a lot of games, probably in the hundreds, I’ve rarely designed one anywhere near as large as Second World War at Sea: South Pacific. We’ve published big games, but none of them were designed by me. The really big ones I’ve designed have never been published, and that’s probably not a coincidence.

South Pacific contains multitudes of games within its box (and is likely the last boxed game we publish at Avalanche Press, as printing and freight costs pummel our tiny business). First off, it has both an operational game, taking place on a map of the Solomon Islands and surrounding waters. This is where the task forces and flights of aircraft move and seek each other out. It’s a big fat map, with art by Tiffany Munro. It stretches from the Japanese naval base at Truk up near the top and the Allied base at Nouméa in New Caledonia down near the bottom edge.

And then there’s the tactical game, where the ships fight each other. In South Pacific, most of that happens on the Ironbottom Sound tactical map. It’s pretty much a complete game on its own, as there was plenty of action in Ironbottom Sound (the waters just north of Guadalcanal).

I have this vision for wargame publishing, one that runs counter to or industry’s conventional wisdom. We want our games to be kept, to be played many times, to be enjoyed with expansion sets and scenario books that make them new to you all over again.

South Pacific is designed to be the core of our game line, and to be a game that you’ll enjoy and perhaps even treasure. And at the center of that – more than the game play, or the pretty maps, or the fantastic ship art – is the story. The history of the bitterly-fought campaign for the Solomon Islands in 1942.

Infantry Attacks, like its sister series Panzer Grenadier and Panzer Grenadier (Modern), only has one type of scenario: troops fighting on the map boards. There’s a lot of variation within that, but they still boil down to moving your pieces on one or more of boards, fitted together to form the map for that particular scenario.

And that’s why South Pacific has a lot of battle scenarios (well, that, and it would have been sinful to include that wonderful Ironbottom Sound tactical map without using it as often as possible). Every operational scenario has at least one battle scenario to go along with it; some of them have more than one (and one has many more than one, but that’s an outlier).

The earliest Second World War at Sea games only had a few battle scenarios, limited to the battles that actually took place (which wasn’t very many – outside of the campaign portrayed in South Pacific, there was not a lot of surface combat in the Second World War at sea). But that’s not really good history – to tell the full story, the game needs to include the battles that were likely to arise from the operations, or that the participants thought likely to take place.

We also take a serious look at the possibilities of other ships that were nearby but not committed getting involved in the action. On the American side, theater commander Robert Ghormley understandably turned out to be rather timid about sending his heavy units into the waters off Guadalcanal following the shocking defeat at Savo Island with the loss of four heavy cruisers in a single night against no Japanese losses. Later, Pacific commander-in-chief Chester Nimitz became reluctant to commit his battleships to surface action even after the fuel shortage in the area, his initial excuse, had abated.

The Japanese, for their part, operated under an Imperial Navy corporate culture that practically demanded hyper-complex plans and piecemeal commitment of forces. Throughout most of the campaign the Japanese had a significant superiority in surface firepower, but continued to fight the Americans at even odds while other ships swung at anchor in Truk Lagoon. In a game like South Pacific, we can look at how the commitment of Hotel Yamato to the actual fighting rather than service as a floating office complex might have affected the campaign. That also lets us put the Japanese super-battleship on the Ironbottom Sound map to square off with Washington and South Dakota.

We stuffed South Pacific with fun things – literally so, as the scenario book couldn’t hold everything I wanted to include, else the game would not have fit in its box. We’ll be back with more scenarios, more historical analysis, and of course some alternative history – as one of our crown jewels, we’ll lavish as much love on South Pacific after publication as we did before. Great games should not be forgotten.

You can order South Pacific right here.
Please allow an extra four weeks for delivery.

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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.

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