Axis & Allies: Pacific

The Empire of Japan versus the United States

AXIS & ALLIES ARTICLES

FEATURED CONTENT

MANUFACTURERS

GAMES

RETAILERS

Are You Game.com

WEBSITE STUFF

How to Play the Axis & Allies: Pacific BoardGame

Axis & Allies: Pacific follows the bitter fighting between the Empire of Japan and the United States and its allies during World War II from 1941 to 1945. When you play the Japanese side, your goal is to gain a new empire and access to enough natural resources so you'll never fear embargo again, ultimately gaining dominance over the Pacific from the British Empire and, especially, the United States of America. If you play the Allied side, your goal is to overcome your initial weakness, marshal your greater resources, punish Japan for its fateful decision to attack a stronger power, and ultimately to recapture what Japan has seized from you and your allies by force.

Axis & Allies: Pacific Background

The War in the Pacific was coming for 50 years, perhaps longer. It was the United States which "opened up" Japan to the West in 1852, when Admiral Dewey appeared in Tokyo Harbor. After the Shogunate and feudalism was swept aside by more modern thinkers (and a strong emperor) in 1868, Japan modernized in a remarkable fashion, learning how to build industries and modern military power from the Europeans and Americans. By 1895, Japan was strong enough to defeat China in a war, ousting that country from the Korean Peninsula. In that same decade (1898), the United States seized the Philippines from Spain, thus expanding America's strategic sphere all the way into the western Pacific. The growing power and influence of each in the region would place the US and Japan on a collision course. Before that collision, Japan would become the first Asian country to defeat a European power in war (Russia in 1904-05). The President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, won the Nobel Prize for negotiating an end to that war, but some in Japan felt they had got less than they deserved (and some blamed the US for this). Strategists on both sides saw a war between the two on the horizon.

Japan allied with the British and the US in World War I, expelling the Germans from their Pacific bases and its Chinese enclaves. But the Japanese were forced to give back some of their claims in China at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919--many in Japan saw it as the second time their supposed friends had undermined their ambitions. When the US and British Empire made a naval treaty in the 1920s based on American and English parity, but limiting Japanese naval power to the 5/5/3 standard (60% the size of either the US or UK's navy), Japan's military and naval leaders began to talk openly of a break with the West. After their invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and northwest China in 1937, leaders in the United States began to grow concerned. With the British Empire and Russia distracted by their troubles in Europe (mainly Nazi Germany), Japan saw its opportunity in 1940 and 1941 to expand its empire and take advantage of the temporary weakness of the European powers. This left only the United States as the only power capable of halting the Japanese advance, something which FDR tried to do with an embargo on iron and oil in the Summer of 1941.

The Japanese, always a resource-poor country, were forced to make a decision: pull back from their recent gains in Southeast Asia and China or confront the mightiest industrial nation on the planet. The Japanese chose war, striking at the greatest block on their expansion in the Pacific with the audacious bombing of the U.S. Navy at its base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Ironically, this attack undermined the Japanese war strategy, because Japanese strategists wanted to seize an empire, then make the cost to the U.S. too high for them to consider retaking it. The sneak attack at Hawaii meant the American public would demand the total defeat of Japan. This is the background of the murderous, hard-fought naval, amphibious, and air war which began in December 1941 and ended with the dropping of the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Axis and Allies: Pacific Rules

Axis & Allies: Pacific is a stand-alone game from Avalon Hill. The combatants are the Japanese, the Americans, the British, and even the Chinese. Most of the rules and set-up are the same as in the original Axis and Allies board game, but you'll find a few innovations. Tiny islands in the Pacific becomes pivotal, due to their use as air and naval bases. The convoy zones and the need to resupply far-flung imperial domains makes the use of submarine packs a key, yet underrated, part of the game. The Chinese mainland is made what it was in real life in the 1940s--weakened, yet nearly impossible to conquer. You'll even find rules for the Japanese kamikaze pilot.

Axis & Allies: Pacific Turn Phases

Below are the nine turn phases each player makes in each turn. You'll make your purchases before the outcome of battles are known.

Purchase Troop Units
Land Fighters on Combat Air Patrol
Make Combat Movement
Resolve Any Combat Situations
Place/Remove National Control Markers; Adjust the National Production Chart
Make Non-Combat Movement
Place New Units Purchased Earlier
Submerged Submarines Resurface; Damaged Battleships Are Turned Upright
Collect Income

Axis & Allies: Pacific Strategy

The key rule that makes Axis&Allies: Pacific so much fun is the Japanese victory point track. If Japan can amass 22 victory points throughout the game, you win the game, no matter what kind of combined arms the Allied forces have. This is a good mechanic which allows for the vast manpower and resource disparity which existed between Japan and her World War II opponents, forcing the Americans and their allies away from the sit-and-build strategy that exists in some versions of Axis & Allies. If Japan collects enough points, that huge fleet the U.S. is building might not be employed in time. While it's a good game mechanic, it seems to give credence to the idea the Japanese could have ever made the cost of retaking their conquered territories too high for the Allies to pay. That's easier said than done and only gives the Japanese a fighting chance, because with the material imbalance in the game, Japan has almost no chance to win a decisive victory over the allies.

India is one of those cases. Avalon Hill eventually wrote a rules addendum for this game to make it harder for Japan to conquer Burma and India in the early stages of the game. Too many Axis & Allies players considered it too easy for Japan, if it focused significant forces on the Burma-India axis and was aggressive enough early on, to simply roll through and conquer. If you are playing by the original rules and you're playing the Japanese side, this is a strategy to employ. Even if it doesn't work perfectly, you can get significant victory points by annexing most of the Indian sub-continent. Good United Nations commanders know how to forestall this happening, though, so the strategy of invading India has fallen out of favor with many players. If the gamble fails, the game is over quickly.

Another option is to invade Australia. This is more difficult to pull over, if for no other reason than it's closer to the United States and therefore easier to reinforce. To invade either India or Australia, it's going to take roughly two turns, so if you play the Allies, you can see the attack coming one round in advance. If you're playing against Japan and the Japanese forces mass near India or Australia, reinforce as much as you can in that spot. Because the spaces near Australia are islands and sea lanes, the Japanese player can feint towards Australia and attack with their fleet elsewhere.

The most common Japanese strategy is more akin to the actual strategy of the war: invade as many islands and coast areas as possible and collect an empire. In this case, the empire involves ICP points. For every 10 ICP points Japan collects per round (to spend on combat units), you also acquire 1 victory point. It's common through controlling a lot of Pacific Islands to get in the high 30s or even 40 ICPs per round, which gives you 3-4 victory points per round.

Allied Strategy in Axis&Allies: Pacific

For the Allies, you have to limit the amount of ICPs Japan gets per round. Keep it from ever getting to 4 ICP, because that means the game will be over in as few as 6 rounds. If you keep the total to 3, the game will last at least 8 rounds and you can build up the overwhelming forces needed to defeat Japan. Also, build up a bomber force, because if you can bomb away 10 ICPs per round, this takes away one of Japan's victory points (before it's acquired) and may keep them from achieving victory for one extra round.

In either case, a purely defensive strategy is not going to win. But it's best to channel your aggression into easy-to-win gains, instead of risking it all on one battle. If the Japanese lose their fleet in one decisive battle, they may never be able to build another. If the Allies lose a carrier fleet in a rout, they risk not having the time to get a new fleet into the battle, even though they have the money to build one. Every time the U.S. builds new naval units, it's likely to take two rounds to get them to the battlefront, so don't stay in a shell, but also don't be foolhardy.