Last evening Alan and I sat down to a game of Command magazine's Victory at Midway, a fine addition to the Midway games, by Ben Knight. Alan took the US forces and I took the Japanese forces.



There is a lot of luck in this game, which is historical, because there was a lot of luck in the carrier battles. The luck went to Alan when it came to initiative in air combat, but it definitely went to me in the fog rolls (fog never lifted) and the searches.

My master plan to send in decoys worked well, almost too well, as Alan was having a hard time finding any of my ships. But finally he found my decoy carrier (babyflattop) forces south of Midway and went to engage them, while my fleet carriers waited in the fog just north of Midway.

During the night he lost sight of my forces, could not find them in the morning, and sent his air strikes to the wrong hexes. My forces in the south knew where his carriers were, but launched no airstrikes, to avoid giving away that they had next to no airpower. I never asked Alan how much he puzzled that no air strikes attacked his carriers.

The ruse continued to work perfectly. On the turn when I struck Midway with everything from the four fleet carriers sitting 2 hexes due north of Midway, he did not find them, and he thought the planes came from the carrier force sitting 2 hexes south of Midway, which he did find. Unfortunately, the Japanese air strike against Midway gave rather poor results (rather historical, actually). I only hit one Marine unit.

But decoys don't last forever, and Alan's airstrikes revealed that my two forces in the south were decoys and scored him about 15 points to my 5.

After a second night, in which my heavy ships detached from the fleet carriers and moved to Midway, the planes were up early in the morning searching for the carriers.

The Americans on Midway found the Japanese heavies at Midway and bombed them, with no damage. The American BB and 2 CAs bombarded Midway and scored a second hit on the Marines.

I had often done no searches to avoid giving away my position. Now I did just 2 air searches, and fairly close together,to keep the number of hexes where I might be as high in number as possible. Alan saved his bombers for the strike and did not use them in air searches, but this turned out very badly for him, because again, the American searches failed to find the Japanese fleet carriers. They were sitting 2 hexes NW of Midway. The American carriers were in two task groups. One (containing Hornet and Enterprise) was just NE of Midway, and the other (containing Lexington) was just SE of Midway. Thus far, the Americans had never sighted the Japanese fleet carriers.

The Japanese planes could reach the NE American task force, which turned out to contain the Hornet and Enterprise and 3 CAs. Another massive airstrike left the Japanese fleet carriers. The Americans again won the combat initiative. The US fighters wiped out 2 Japanese Dive Bomber squadrons and damaged a number of Torpedo Bomber squadrons. But the return fire was frightening. All 7 US fighter squadrons went down. And the Japanese bombers did their job and sent the Hornet and Enterprise to the bottom.

At this point we were on turn 15. The Japanese gained over 30 points from that attack, for a total score of 43.5. Americans had 19 points, plus 11 for Midway, which they still held, for a total of 30. Alan conceded the game on the condition that I would show him where my fleet carriers were. I agreed.

It took us about 3 hours to play to this point. I didn't quite have all the rules down. We did find the carriers to be very fragile in this game. All in all, it was a lot of fun, and we look forward to playing again.

Joe