From: casper@axcrnb.cern.ch (Dave Casper)
Subject: Re: Pearl Harbor, GDW

In article <553kqm$44o@stratus.CAM.ORG>, kwebec@CAM.ORG (Marc Guenette) writes...
>Hello!
> 
>I would appreciate any comments on that games.

Pearl Harbor was designed by John Prados, designer of the original Third Reich,
and it bore some resemblance to the European game, although it was not
directly linkable, and didn't use the same air/naval combat system (which was
primitive by modern standards in Third Reich, 1st Edition).

PH was a mainly corps level game, with seasonal turns, which went through three
editions (of which I have only seen the first two).  It was kind of fun to
play, although the naval system relative to carrier combat was somewhat
confusing and to me disappointing.  After about 6 pages of Q&A sent to GDW, I
still wasn't really able to figure out the interaction between the various
naval missions.

Naval units were quantized into the equivalent of squadrons, with heavy,
light, and carrier squadrons being differentiated.  One serious obstacle to
the success of the naval combat system, in my opinion, was that there was very
limited provision for partial losses or breakdown of air or naval units.  This
meant that a 10 factor US land-based air unit, for instance, could do one thing
at at time, and was either unaffected by combat or completely destroyed.  By
the same token, a 6 factor US carrier air component could either attack the
enemy or defend its carriers - you could have part of it fly CAP and part of it
attack, and again, it was either wiped out or unaffected by combat.  Probably
budget limitations prevented a system by which air units could be broken down
like change.

If you can pick the game up for a good price, it may be worth the money.  OTOH,
I think the state of the art has advanced considerably since this game was
released.  AH's Rising Sun (which I co-designed) shares a lineage with the
Third Reich system (although it is fully compatible with the latest version of
the European system).  A lot of what I tried to do with the carrier combat
system in RS was directly influenced by my experience with what didn't work in
PH.  Rising Sun is admittedly more complex than PH, but the naval system seems
to work, based on my experience playing the game and the feedback I've gotten
from other players, and is rather more detailed.

There are lots of other PTO games out there which I think are also better than
PH - VGs Pacific War at the high end of the detail/complexity scale, and also
the WWII:PTO game by TSR/SPI/Decision Games (whichever owns it these days).

So I would say if you want a strategic PTO game which works well, you have some
better choices than PH, but it isn't the worst game on the subject (an honor
which probably goes to SimCan's Divine Wind or Task Force Games' East Wind
Rain).

BTW, if anybody has a copy of the 3rd edition rules to Pearl Harbor, I'd like
to buy a copy of them...

Dave
d.casper@cern.ch