Singapore, 1942. The Gibraltar of the East. The Crown Jewel of the British Empire’s Far East possessions. The site of a £60 million naval base built over a period of 8 years, that in modern terms would have cost US$4 billion. An island fortress that was the cornerstone of British defence in Asia and the Pacific.

Or was it?

When the eyes of the world following the war finally reached the “gates” of the “fortress”, everyone was shocked.  Everyone.  The harried and retreating British soldier saw no defensive works to afford him a moment of respite; no impregnable gates that would slam shut behind him.  The triumphant Japanese soldier saw no bristling defences to shake his confidence or blunt his advance.  The British tax-payer in London saw an expensive naval base without a single ship in it and four airbases with only a lone squadron of modern Hurricanes.  Prime Minister Churchill saw to his utter amazement, “an almost naked island”.  It was a fortress with walls of air.

Nearly ten weeks before, when the Battle of Malaya first started, the civilian authority in Singapore had, in its supreme wisdom, decided that building defensive works would panic the urban population in Singapore City and vetoed most defensive preparations.  The war, less than a thousand miles to the North, still seemed far away.  Instead the strategy was to pretend nothing was happening.  Cabarets went on and parties continued.

In fact, right up to the last doomed moment, the only epithet Singapore lived up to was “Sin-Galore!”.

FIELD COMMAND: SINGAPORE 1942:

Such is the intriguing backdrop of the first game of our Field Command series.  Field Command: Singapore 1942 depicts the Battle of Singapore during the Second World War.  It was to be the greatest military defeat of the greatest empire of all time with 130,000 Allied troops captured.  The Japanese commanders boasted that they would conquer the entire length of the Malayan Peninsula in 100 days.  They did it in 70.  The Battle of Singapore is the last act of their lightning campaign.

As the Japanese commander, it is a virtual certainty that Singapore will fall.  Your challenge is to achieve it as quickly as possible, before your supplies run out.  You have no reinforcements except for some juicy light tank units roughly mid-way through the battle.

As the British commander, your mission is to delay the Japanese long enough to salvage British pride.  You have strength in numbers, but you will quickly realize that this counts for little against the motivated and well-trained Japanese troops.  You will also have to manage your Australian ally who has his own agenda.

As the Australian commander, your units are few, but they are pivotal to the outcome of the battle.  You have to choose between fulfilling your own victory conditions and propping up a weak (in your eyes, perhaps even useless) ally.

Combat System:

In terms of game mechanics, one of the key features that differentiate the Field Command series from other campaign-level wargames is that tactics are actually modelled in the Field Command combat system.

For each engagement, you have to make decisions such as whether to flank, call air strikes, call artillery strikes and so forth.  In many instances, we have seen a small force with superior tactics defeat a large but poorly-led formation.  This ability to go beyond abstract die-rolling has proven to be very popular with our gamers, as it delivers a more varied and substantially different gameplay experience.

Replayability:

Once you are thoroughly familiar with the Historic Scenario: Impregnable Fortress, we have provided you with three options:

Option 1 – Try the “open” scenario, The Almost Naked Island, where, as the invader, you cansimulate attacking the island from non-historical directions, including by sea and, as the defender, you can deviate from the classic full perimeter defense.  This scenario also allows for deception with special rules for feint attacks during the opening of the battle.

Option 2 – Try the hypothetical scenario, Operation Tiderace.  This models the re-capture of Singapore by the British forces, led by the Royal Marines, in September 1945.  This scenario is, in fact, based on history, as the Japanese commander, General Seishirō Itagaki, who was briefly the Japanese War Minister, did actually contemplate resisting.  Amazingly, this was despite the Japanese Empire having already surrendered barely two weeks before.

Option 3 – Try the Cards Expansion, which will be launched very soon.  It has separate decks for the Japanese and the Allies, with 36 cards per deck.  The cards reflect unique episodes from the Battle of Singapore that are too complex or too unbalancing to incorporate into the basic game.  Examples are Yamashita’s Bluff, Gunners’ Last Stand, Banzai Charge, Armoured Push, and Booming Fortress Guns.  Without distracting from the core gameplay, these cards add a degree of variability and uncertainty that separates the textbook player (like Percival) from a brilliant strategist (like Yamashita).

DESIGNER NOTES: 

At this point, perhaps you would like a bit of an insight into the design decisions that the WorldsForge design team made for Field Command: Singapore 1942.  I’ll touch on as many points as space allows.

For the series, we had two guiding principles during the design process.  First, simple mechanics for newcomers with a deep and varied experience for experts.  Second, an immersive experience both from the components and from the emotions evoked in the combatants as they played through the game.

We chose the Battle of Singapore as the first game in the series, as it is an important battle that had not been commonly done by other game companies.

Getting the core combat resolution mechanic right is probably the most critical part of the process, and the most difficult.  We needed a mechanic that was instantly understood, yet provided variation and had no “foregone” conclusion.  In fact, we went up a couple of dead-ends and had to start from scratch a couple times before settling on the final comparison-based mechanic that you now find in the game.  This mechanics serves very well as, once understood, we can layer variations on top of it easily.

We also designed the combat system to allow for tactical decisions that so often made the difference in a real battle.  A battle at this scale was not about the weight of numbers.  In fact, the Battle of Singapore was the perfect example.  The British outnumbered the Japanese by three to one and still lost, largely due to superior Japanese tactics.

The relatively clean rules preclude Field Command: Singapore 1942 from being a complex historical simulation, which was not our aim in any case.  However, we believe that this does not stop us adding the necessary historical flavour that creates a total gameplay experience for our players.  The copious amount of flavour text and information you will see in the rulebook, the various game components and even the box, are all part of this effort.

Along the same vein, we also wanted to make sure that the player faced the same key dilemmas of the actual commanders of the time for a truly immersive experience.  This led to the decision to split the command of the Allied side under two players.  In fact, historically, the British commander, Lieutenant-General Percival, had many disagreements with the Australian commander, Major-General Bennett.  Late in the battle, Bennett actually ordered his Australian units to stop firing on the Japanese troops and left the British to fend for themselves.  We modelled this through the disjoint in the British and Australian victory conditions.

Finally, like any battle, there were also many interesting and possibly unique tactics and episodes that we wanted to capture.  For instance, the Japanese tried the ruse of disguising themselves as Indian soldiers.  However, to include disguise rules would have made the game too complex.  When can a unit disguise itself?  What is the allowed frequency?  How does a disguised unit get detected?  The solution was to use cards.  This allowed both a good control of the frequency (making most events essentially unique per game session) and the compartmentalization of the related rules into a bite-size package that players can easily digest.  The added advantage of the randomness of a card deck meant that the gamer does not feel “railroaded” into mirroring the historical timeline to the minute.

FUTURE PLANS:

We had great fun designing Field Command: Singapore 1942.  So much fun, in fact, that we are now working on Field Command: Iwo Jima 1945.  We hope that you will have as much fun playing the game as we did.