I have very fond memories of (original) Axis and Allies. I sold my copy before moving to Australia and it’s one of the few things that I regret not having shipped over - mind you, if the comments on http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/363445 are anything to go by then trying to ship a Gamemaster game would probably have resulted in me having to write this review from Guantanamo Bay. Recently I thought about reinvesting in a copy, but searching on the Geek revealed that not only had they revised the original game but there were a plethora of spin-offs focusing on specific theatres of war. I remained unconvinced. Why would you revise Axis and Allies? Isn’t that like revising Shakespeare? And losing the epic global focus to concentrate purely on who controlled a small cowshed just outside Nantes didn’t sound too attractive either. But I was reliably informed that some of the other A&A games were quite good, with Guadacanal being the pick of the bunch. After reading a session report that made the game sound pretty exciting ( http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/354240) I thought it might be worth taking a risk and making the purchase. So I did. And this is my review of the game.

Components

Ho-hum. I don’t normally think about making comments on the components when I write a review. My feeling is that the general quality of game components these days is very good, and that a game must have either really excellent or really broken components to warrant their mention in a review. But it’s National "Mention Components in a Game Review" day today so I feel compelled.

Well, the components in A&A: Guadalcanal are very good. You would expect this, seeing as the game comes from major publisher Wizards of the Coast/Avalon Hill/Hasbro/Whatever Company We’ve Swallowed Up Today. As a result, production standards are pretty high across the board and that can only be a good thing. Chalk one up for faceless mega-global corporations!

The game board is excellent quality and the plastic game pieces (let’s face it, they’re the real reason anyone buys A&A games) are splendid for both adults and children alike - though they’ll jam painfully in the throat of a two-year old girl. Or so I've heard. The only probably I had with them was that it took me a few hours to become totally comfortable with what all the pieces are. It’s an endless succession of tiny warships with jagged skylines, and it led to a few "Is that a Cruiser or a Destroyer?" moments for the first couple of turns. Once you realise that Destroyers have a flat aft (or ‘backside’ to use the non-nautical term) you’ll be fine.

You know what? I even liked the player reference cards. Normally I despise these things, but I guess that comes from the fact that most of the games I play are Euros and as such they have player reference postage stamps with a type-font chosen by ants. A&A: Guadalcanal’s cards contain everything that you need to know and are a nice big size. I’m talking ‘You-Must-Be-Compensating-For-Something’ big here. And I like them.

The only thing I don’t like is the Battlebox. I don’t have a problem with the system (I’ll talk a bit more about combat under the ‘Mechanics’ section), but rather I have a problem with the Battlebox itself. It’s clearly designed to try and make the combat flow easier, but it’s clumsy and awkward. The purist in me is suspicious about how you can give twelve dice a really good shake in a box so small, while the consumer in me searches it for damage after every combat phase. I remain sceptical about its randomising qualities, and suspect that it won’t survive for as long as the rest of the game components. I've seen some interesting workarounds on the BGG site, so clearly I'm not the only one dissatisfied with it.

The rules are fine and quite well written, but there is a misprint concerning the number of reinforcement points each player gets and some other ambiguities. These things are mostly cleared up by the FAQ and Errata (though I’m still not sure if multiple Submarines in a sea zone all have to declare targets before they roll or if you can do it one at a time).

It’s also worth mentioning that the Allied Cruisers comes in Japanese colours, and the Axis Cruisers in American colours. Avalon Hill will, I gather, replace them for free if you contact their Customer Services. However, I live in Australia and would have to go through the USA office so I - quite frankly - can’t be bothered. After all, you can play the game just fine as it stands.

Mechanics

So how does it play? Well, in terms of gameplay it has very little in common with the original A&A. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this isn’t A&A at all. If it were designed by someone other than Larry Harris, and published as part of a different franchise there would be absolutely no way that I’d play this game and think "Man, they ripped off Axis and Allies!". For starters, players move simultaneously - one unit type at a time, with the first move alternating turn-by-turn. Combat is divided into air, sea and land phases - with different units exercising different power in all three. The game is won with Victory Points, which are gathered by building airfields and sinking capital ships. A key component of success is the building and transporting of supplies. And it all works extremely well.

Let’s deal with this in phases. The first is the movement phase. It works like this. The first player moves his transports, and then the second player moves his transports. The first player moves his battleships. Then the second player moves his battleships. And so on. What this does is create two distinct ‘advantages’ for both players. The first player gets to dictate the flow of the movement turn. He moves his transports first, and in this game how you use your transports is the key to victory. In doing so, he declares his intentions to the second player and the second player is instantly forced to move his units in response to the first player’s moves. However, in declaring his intentions the first player also allows the second player to choose the battleground. If you first move your battleship into the same sea zone as my battleship, then I am free to move my battleship out of that sea zone and avoid combat. In short, player two gets to pick whether or not combat is going to happen this turn. With first turn alternating between the players it creates an incredibly tense flow of ‘will he, won’t he?’ that drives a lot of the game. I think a more accurate title for this game would be Axis and Allies: Cat and Mouse, because that’s how it often plays out.

The next step is combat, where all air combats are resolved first, and then all sea combats and then finally land combat. Units contribute power to each theatre, and can only be destroyed in the combat phase which reflects their unit type. First, fighters and bombers battle it out above the skies, with ships and AA guns adding flak. If your fighters and bombers survive the first phase, then they add to your sea and land attack capabilities and do so with impunity. If your transports survive the sea phase, they can drop off their cargo before the land phase. It seems a little complicated at first, but soon falls into place.

Unlike vanilla A&A, units don’t have a power value that relates to a number that must be rolled. Instead they contribute a number of dice, with all rolls of 1 or 2 being counted as a hit. This is where the Battlebox comes in, because each individual die is assigned to a random target. You roll the dice in the box and pull out a little tray that allows each die to align against a particular unit type. This means that your hits are counted against random targets and this works well too - though it can be annoying to lose a Capital Ship instead of a Destroyer not just because your opponent rolled a ‘1’, but because he happened to roll it on the third dice. On the positive side, it allows exciting battles where Cruisers and Destroyers are sunk but your key transport survives long enough to offload its troops onto New Georgia.

Finally, the third phase deals with ‘bookkeeping’. Planes are returned to landing sites, airfields are built and repaired and reinforcements shipped in. An interesting mechanic is the spending of supplies to move ships onto the board in this phase. It may seem extravagant to spend supplies to make sure that your Submarine gets onto the board (especially as supplies have so many other key uses) but with sea units only moving one zone per turn and the short number of turns that you will have, it can really make a difference to your game plan. Another great aspect is the contrast between reinforcement points and Victory Points. Reinforcement points are related to the number of islands that you hold, while Victory Points come from airfields that you own. It’s possible for one side to hold the island while another holds the airfield, and this keeps the game close right to the end. Even in games where one side is managing to hold most of the islands and therefore bring in the most reinforcements, it’s possible for the other side to win simply by preventing their opponent from building airfields or from am ambitious airfield-acquiring amphibious assault on the final turn. In my last game I felt like I was getting smashed from turn two onwards, but in the end I only lost by two Victory Points which is in no means an insurmountable obstacle.

Final Thoughts

A&A: Guadalcanal is a wargame-lite with very little in common with its parent game. It feels a lot more strategic than A&A, and is certainly a much tenser, more balanced experience. Both sides offer very different approaches, though it seems to me that America really only has one opening move (that is to take Malaita and Santa Isabel in the first-turn - New Georgia is too close to Axis air power for a guaranteed first-turn assault). It has the obvious benefit of not taking four days to play a complete game, as once someone reaches fifteen VPs it’s game over. In general this will take between two and three hours (as advertised on the box) though if both sides are tied at the end it’ll run to nearer four. My first game was a 25 to 24 point thriller and I enjoyed every minute of it - though it was certainly tense.

Ah, the tension. Alan Dean Foster once wrote that short stories are much harder to write than epic novels. He argued that short stories provide no place for the author to hide. He cannot make up for that poor dialogue on page 22 with a mammoth space battle on page 287. A&A: Guadalcanal feels a bit like that. In the original A&A, a mistaken invasion of Libya in turn three will probably not hinder your chances in the long-run. Anyway, you can always make up for it with that ballsy strike on Norway in turn eight. In A&A: Guadalcanal you don’t get that luxury. If you screw up on turn three then you can’t make up for it on turn five or six, as the game will probably be over by turn four. This may lead, in the right (wrong?) company, to a lot of Analysis Paralysis. Your choices matter, and sometimes the dice can really ruin your day, so bear that in mind when considering whether or not this game is for you.

In conclusion though, I can only praise this effort from Larry Harris. In some ways, it would be easy for him to make a few minor adjustments and repackage A&A once a year. He’d probably get decent sales out of it too. A&A: Guadalcanal is clearly the work of a man who feels loyalty to his original magnum opus, but yet does not feel compelled to stick to the same tired mechanics if something better works. I’ve played a few two-player wargames over the years, from heavy, paper-and-chit games to lighter fare. A&A: Guadalcanal is one of the most enjoyable and satisfying that I’ve ever played and I can’t think of much higher praise than that. Though I still don’t like that Battlebox.