Bucha, Ukraine - 27 Feb 2022 - 15mm
Battleship Showdown - "Naval War" System - Live Game
Oriskany Jim and Mark Ritchie sit down for a game of H. J. Seimonsgergen’s “Naval War” – depicting part of the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on the night of 14-15 November, 1942.
Although the Pacific War is typically dominated by aircraft carriers and submarines, heavy cruisers and battleships could still play a key role not only in escort, AA defense, and shore bombardment, but also old-school gunnery duels. These almost always took place at night, when aircraft operations were limited. Through late 1942 and early 43, the US and Japanese navies fought a bitter, non-stop series of naval engagements in the Solomon Islands, many of them surface engagements at night.
One of the largest of these was the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, where Japanese battleships like the Kirishima tangled with American battlewagons like and USS Washington and South Dakota – a heavyweight slugging match for the ages.
Live Stream – 2:00PM East US / 7:00PM UK
Sitrep Podcast YouTube
Here is the map for today's game. ? Close and personal, only 20 miles across (each "gameboard inch" grid is about 1/4 of a mile or approx 400 meters). The game starts with 2nd Naval Battle of Guadalcanal already in progress - historically it unfolded in three general stages and we're starting at stage 3 to keep the game a little more manageable. 
Ships, clearly, are NOT to scale with the map. Blue dot shows their true location. They are in scale with each other, though.
Historical progress of the fight. The red rectangle is the area of our map.
A little background and the major players.
Now the designer has dispensed with "Command Station" sheets in v1.5, opting for a more expansive and flexible card system. But that's tough to stream. So I rebuilt a custom version of the command station dashboard, using rules on the cards. Orange commands are specific to the Imperial Japanese Navy.
The American command station dashboard.
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