“I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm’s way.” John Paul Jones, 1778 Devil Boats: PT Boats in the Solomons. Board Game Review Iain Martin
Devil Boats: PT Boats in the Solomons Board Game Review. Publisher: Compass Games Designer: Joe Carter Price $69.00
Passed Inspection: well researched, historically accurate, easy to learn rules, beautiful components, easily moded, strong narrative campaign, can easily add players.
Failed Basic: printed errata sheet or revised rulebook did not ship with the retail version but are available for download.
Devil Boats: PT Boats in the Solomons is the first wargame design by Joe Carter covering the summer and early fall of 1943 as the Allies launched the New Georgia campaign. PT boats played a key role in the Solomons attacking enemy supply ships, rescuing downed airmen or shipwrecked sailors, and supporting the Coastwatchers.
It was the greatest speech he ever gave in his life , and it marked a turning point in his pursuit of his dream, but it had the note of a eulogy. This is the story of how and why the legendary designer Chris Crawford left the games industry in an opening-day lecture at the 1993 Game Developers Conference, an event that he had founded just six years prior.
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1 Sequence of Play and Attack Procedure sheet
17 Solitaire system cards
1 Solitaire Play Aid Sheet
Starting with the game board, we find a mounted board that depicts the geography of southern and central Finland. The northern reaches of Finland are omitted. This reflects the distribution of population in Finland. The biggest city is Helsinki with the other towns and regions having lesser populations as you continue inland away from the coasts.
The map depicts the background landforms in an icy blue-white. (Foucault might ask “why are Finland’s land forms often depicted as a shade of white on many maps?”, but I digress.) Town spaces are superimposed on the provinces and depicted with a black and white image representation of each settlement. It’s a pattern familiar to most tabletop game players. But, unlike other COIN titles such as
The board game is fascinating but also very unwieldly and hard to play.
There are countless computer military simulations available that accurately render weapons, vehicles and even the settings of many of the most famous conflicts in history. Yet, missing from even the most “hardcore” of those games are the issues of logistics, supplies and the uncertainty of war. For those armchair generals out there who have some extra time on their hands and desire a real challenge there is a meticulously detailed table top military board game that has become infamous for its complexity.
More than forty years since it was released, even its designers consider it nearly unplayable, and for those reasons it has become akin to a “White Whale” for the most serious war gamers.