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My dad would love this game.
Victory At Sea: Battle for the Pacific is a starter set for the Victory at Sea line from Warlord Games, which, as the title suggests, pits the Japanese against the Americans in World War Two naval combat.
The reason that my dad would love it, and that I am also fascinated by it, is the rule book (which does not come with the starter set but is an extra $63 on Amazon). The rulebook for this game–the core rule book–is just shy of 280 pages. That gives any Warhammer core rule book a run for its money. And the amazing thing is that I learned the game not through this massive tome but through the 20-odd page booklet included in the starter set.
What makes the Victory at Sea Core Rule Book so big–and so cool–is that it is made by someone who knows history, who loves history, and who wants to tell everyone about history. The book is enormous partially because it is full of scenarios, but mainly because it spend more than half of those 280 pages listing every single boat ever to enter the sea in World War Two (and some that never got out of drydock, but are included nonetheless).
The detail of Victory at Sea is what makes it so fun, in my opinion, and the gameplay.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I always review a game in Gameplay, Hobby, and Lore.
Gameplay for Victory at Sea: Battle for the Pacific
This game moves very fast, except for when it doesn’t. But even when it doesn’t, it’s engaging so you don’t mind that it’s slowed down a bit.
You start off by rolling initiative, which is very straightforward (roll a D10, highest roll gets to go second). Then you get into the Movement Phase, which is an alternate activation affair–you pick a ship, your opponent picks a ship, and so on until you run out of ships. No one is allowed to take a pass–you’re all in the middle of a battle and you’ve got inertia, you can’t just stop on a dime. The closest thing is making a hard 90 degree turn, which requires that your crew has to take a quality test.
As you can see from the image here, this is the battleship Yamato, and there is an arc marker that you use to determine how much you can alter course on any given movement. (All the ships have different movement characteristics for speed, but they all tend to follow the same turning radius measurement.) You go through all of your movement until everyone is done, and then it’s time to shoot each other.
And this is where things slow down, but in a way that delights me. Each ship in your fleet comes with a card (if you have the Core Book you don’t necessarily need cards, but it’s so much more handy to have the cards.) Here is the card for the battleship Yamato. As you can see it has a plethora of gun options. The little pie chart next to the gun’s designation is showing you the arcs that the gun can shoot from: fore, aft, port, starboard. In the case of the Yamato, turrets A and B can both shoot fore, port, and starboard, while turret C can shoot aft, port and starboard. Similarly, the P turret can only shoot to port and the S turret can only shoot to starboard.
So look at Turret A: let’s say it’s shooting short range to port. Then it can roll 3 Attack Dice (AD) and each hit with an attack dice gets four damage dice (DD). They are heavy, which gives them some penalties, but they have an armor piercing of +2 which means you add 2 to every damage die. Now, you can imagine that if you get broadsided by the Yamato with turrets A, B, and C all firing at you (9 Attack Dice, which could turn into 36 Damage Dice if all goes well) (plus 2 each) then you’re not going to last long. But that’s what you get for getting too close to a battleship. (For reference, you can see that the Yamato has 148 hull points, which is how much damage it can sustain.)
It should also be mentioned that the Yamato doesn’t come with the Battle for the Pacific starter set. I bought it separately because I thought it was really cool. And it is. It also costs 1000 points, so…
Anyway, that’s how the shooting phase of the game goes. Now, there are two things in the game that I didn’t try out, because I didn’t have the models for them. The first is submarines, so I can’t speak to those, and the second is aircraft, because I didn’t buy any aircraft carriers. But be aware that they exist and are given a lot of information in the Core Rules.
Finally, is the clean up phase where you do things like try to put out fires on your ships and place and remove various tokens.
All in all, I really loved the gameplay of this Victory at Sea. I’m a sucker for naval games. I really loved the gameplay of Mantic’s Armada, which took a lot of its material from Warlord Games’ Black Seas (another game I own but have never gotten around to playing because I CAN’T GET THE RIGGING RIGHT ON THE DAMN SHIPS.)
I have no complaints at all with the gameplay. It goes fast, then slows for shooting, but the shooting is engaging, and then game is over in 45 minutes.
It gets a solid 9/10 for Gameplay.
Hobby for Victory at Sea: Battle for the Pacific
The hobby aspect here is really, I hate to say it, lackluster. This game sat on my shelf for over a year without me painting it or playing it, and then I pulled it out, deciding I was going to spend a whole day painting ships and… I was pretty much done with the whole set in two hours.
I tried to find historical photographs of the ships, to figure out which ones had the zebra stripe camouflage paint on the hulls, and which ones had wooden decks, and even with that effort, at 1/800 scale there’s only so much you can do to paint them. I honestly think I spent more time trying to get the water to look consistent across all the ships than I did to get the ships right.
One nitpick: to the untrained eye, it is very hard to tell the difference between some of the ships–even Japanese versus American. For the life of me I could not identify whether the I was looking at a Fubuki-class destroyer or a Fletcher-class destroyer. And supposedly you can paint the little raised lettering on the ships–I managed to do it on a few, such as the USS Northhampton, but on the little ships the lettering was SMALL and almost impossible to pick out with my tiniest brush. So kudos to whoever did the models they put on the box. Your names look great. Mine don’t.
And there really isn’t much you can do to spice up your force. It’s historical, so you want them to be historically accurate (I mean, I do, and my dad would). And the bases are just water so you can’t do anything creative there.
I think I just have to accept the fact that these are models meant to be played with, but nothing that you’d show off in the display cabinet.
It gets a 3/10 for Hobby.
Lore for Victory at Sea: Battle for the Pacific
Did I mention that the Core Rules is 280 pages? This thing is detailed, and there is so much to read that you are literally overwhelmed by the sheer size of it. And while half the book is just ship stats (and more ship stats and more ship stats), the rest of it is mostly scenarios. (There is a rules section which is about twice the size of the booklet that is in the Battle for the Pacific starter set, but I didn’t feel like I lost out on any critical gameplay information which the shorter size.)
But the scenario information is excellent, and includes things like shore guns and drydocks and all sorts of fun things.
On the OTHER HAND, if we’re ignoring the Core Book, and we’re only reviewing Victory at Sea: Battle for the Pacific, then the lore is a little bit lacking. There is very little fluff, just rules.
On the OTHER HAND, I have already made a habit out of giving good Lore scores to games that are based on something with a lot of Lore (such as my review of Marvel Crisis Protocol and its comic book lore, and my review of Star Wars Legion and its review of all the Star Wars stuff.) So in that sense, I should really say that the Lore of Victory at Sea: Battle for the Pacific is ALL OF HISTORY, and there’s been no war more meticulously studied and written about than World War Two. So, you know, a lot of Lore.
I have to give my first Lore score of 10/10 to Victory at Sea.
Conclusion: Victory at Sea: Battle for the Pacific
I really, really loved this game. My main quibbles were with the lack of fun stuff to paint (which is a big deal to me) but the gamer in me is able to look past it and see a really fun game. And, just because I like to take digs at Armada, this is all the naval combat fun AND includes resin models, but the resin models aren’t warped and awful.
Anyway, pick it up.
(There’s also the Kriegsmarine Fleet, the Imperial Japanese Naval Fleet, and the American Fleet that you can buy to get started.)