Slitherine

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The case smelled worse than sushi that had been left out in the sun, but he had money and my wallet was as flat as a flounder run over by an oxcart.

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ORIGINAL: Cuttlefish

I was beginning to get the picture, and it wasn’t pretty. It was a numbers racket, and the mob called the Allies had the numbers. My client had tried to muscle in on their turf. It had worked for a while, I guess they hadn’t taken the guy in the white suit seriously enough, but now they were pushing back – hard.

If I didn’t do something fast things were going to get uglier than a Phyllis Diller look-alike contest. A lot of guys were already pushing up daisies, guys named Junyo, Hiyo, and Soryu, Hibiki had been given a pair of cement overshoes and sent for a swim off of Perth. Someone was going to pay for that one, ‘cause Hibiki was a friend of mine.

Worst of all, someone had cut the head off the Japanese Army in Burma and mailed it back to Tokyo in a box. I called in my partner, Feurer Krieg, to check that one out. He grabbed some quinine tablets and headed off into the jungle. He was a brave guy. Too brave. I gave him about the same chance to make it as a tabby cat at a Rottweiler convention.

Yamamoto had bitten off more than he could chew and now it was time to pay the piper. But he’d hired me to do a job and I was going to try and do it. I packed a bag and bought a ticket to Port Moresby. One way. I didn’t think I’d be coming back.

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Taking over a game in the right in the middle is kind of interesting. For a Japanese player it’s a lot like running the first turn of the game, except that you don’t know where anything is to start with. It is also educational. Things have been done completely differently in this game than I would have done them. In some cases it’s like “Hey, that’s clever, I never thought of doing that before.” In others it’s more like “Oh my god, what were they thinking?” Both ways there are lessons to be learned that give me a chance to improve my skills as a player.

I am just going to give some quick first impressions of the situation in the Pacific at the moment. Look for some more detailed information, screenshots and etc., in the near future.

It is February 1943. Japan controls an impressive amount of territory in the Pacific. Cap Mandrake had posted a good map showing who controls what shortly before I had to stop reading his AAR, so I will refer the curious there for the moment.

But there are serious problems:

- Supply levels are low almost everywhere, especially in Japan. This is compounded by a crippling shortage of AKs. There is at the moment not a single AK in the Home Islands. Not one.

- There are not enough troops to establish a good defensive perimeter. What little there is to spare is all on the way to the CBI theater. The units lost at Perth are sorely missed.

- The Imperial Navy is beaten up and worn out. Capital ship losses are not too bad – three of the smaller fleet carriers, two battleships, and a fair number of cruisers have been lost, but the core remains intact, though most important ships are suffering from battle damage or high system damage. Most of the fleet is in Japan and a month of R&R will cure most of their woes. The real problem is a serious shortage of destroyers. Many of these vital ships have been lost.

My own style of play as Japan is very careful, relying on defense in depth and conservation of forces. This game has been played in a much more wide open fashion. I am going to have to learn new tricks and new tactics to put up a good fight here. Mostly what I need is time. In a one on one game I would have some hope that the debacle in Burma would keep my opponent’s attention elsewhere while I reorganize the forces in the Pacific, but it’s a two on two game and I doubt Tabpub intends to give me the time. I wouldn’t, if it were me - the period immediately after a change of command is an ideal time to strike. We will see what happens.

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I carry a Nambu pistol and a hip flask of whiskey. The pistol is crappy and the whiskey isn’t very good, but then again I’m not much of a detective.

I was sitting in my Tokyo office with my feet up on the desk when this navy type dressed in white came in. He called himself Yamamoto, and he had a case. It seems that a lot of his friends had gone to Australia and hadn’t come back. There was a lot of stuff missing – freighters, destroyers, supplies, that sort of thing. Something bad had gone down out there and he wanted me to get to the bottom of it.