Carrier At War

Carriers at War is the latest in a series of remakes of classic SSG turn-based wargames. For those of us addicted to turn-based wargames, SSG is the Pablo Escobar of the game industry, known for some of the most famous games in the genre.

If the company’s products have a weakness, it is that the company hails from the antediluvian days of the computer gaming industry, and so, sometimes, do their user interfaces. SSG games range in design from elegant and simple (e.g. Warlords) to unplayably baroque (e.g. Battlefront). Carriers at War, I am pleased to say, is much closer to the former than the latter. It has the accessibility of Panzer General combined with the strategic depth of The Lost Admiral Returns.

The game effectively simulates both of the grand challenges of strategic ship combat in the Pacific. Search is beautifully depicted (reports of sightings come in, but they are uncertain and often inaccurate), as is combat, where with each strike you must balance your desire to inflict a fatal blow on the enemy against the risk of leaving yourself without adequate defensive combat air patrol. The tension you feel after sending out a strike is exquisite.

One aspect of Carriers that it accomplishes grandly is playing the “What if?” game. The included scenarios – Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Coral Sea, Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, and Phillipine Sea – cover the breadth of the war in the Pacific. A number of the scenarios also have variants (for example, a version of Pearl Harbor where the US was expecting the attack). The game shows the great extent to which warfare in this era was about information. One can’t play as the Japanese in Midway and not know that there are three American carriers out there, an advantage denied that nation in real life. Needless to say, this can lead to dramatically different outcomes than were seen historically.

Is there anything missing? A scenario builder would be nice, but given that most of the great Pacific naval battles of World War II are here, it’s hard to complain too strenuously. On the whole, this is a wonderful game for those who enjoy naval combat simulation games.